Michael Daniel

My main interest in the study of language lies with linguistic diversity and variation, be it variation across languages or within one single language. I pursued this line in my typological studies of the languages of the world, in my intra-genealogical comparative research on the languages of Daghestan, and in my investigations of the variability and diachronic evolution of linguistic structures within specific languages and across their dialects. Variation within a system is indicative of social mechanisms governing the use of a language by members of the same speech community, and variation across systems is indicative of the functional mechanisms that constrain the limits of human communication; in this sense, the study of language is not that dissimilar to the study of biological species. While this combination of variationist and typological focus in one researcher is probably not extremely common in the field of linguistics, I believe that linguistic differences are more informative than similarities, and should be a starting point in any approach to the study of language.