Charles Reiss

Professor, Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics

status: Professor of Linguistics and Founding Member, Concordia Centre for Cognitive Science

Research areas: Phonology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science

Contact information

Email:

charles.reiss@concordia.ca

Websites:

ReserchGateProfile
Concordia Centre for Cognitive Science

ORCID:

0000-0002-8215-8252

Biography

As for my own methods of investigation, I do not really have any. The only method of investigation is to look hard at a serious problem and try to get some ideas as to what might be the explanation for it, meanwhile keeping an open mind about all sorts of other possibilities. Well, that is not a method. It is just being reasonable, and so far as I know, that is the only way to deal with any problem.
Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge, 1988: 190

I am a theroretical linguist. I focus on phonology. I tend to work on very narrow issues, but I like to wax philosophical about their implications for linguistics and cognitive science. Mark Hale and I coined the term “substance free phonology” to characterize the formal approach to phonology that you can read about in my books with Mark Hale (2008) and with Alan Bale (2018), and recent work with Veno Volenec and Kyle Gorman. I don’t focus on any particular languages—one is as good as another for my purposes. My favorite course to teach at Concordia is Language and Mind: The Chomskyan Program—I like the idea of making 100 naive students learn about negative polarity items, the cognitive revolution, vowel harmony, finite state machines, unconscious knowledge and ergativity. The text I use is my book with Dana Isac (2008/2013). I sometimes give short courses abroad.