Research

Max Wheeler, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, is a leading expert on the Catalan language, and researches on phonology and on change in inflectional morphology. In 2005 he published The Phonology of Catalan for the Oxford University Press's series The Phonology of the World's Languages. From 1998 to 2007 he was joint editor of the electronic Journal of Catalan Studies. As a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary etymology editors he has answered over 2000 questions relating to Spanish, Catalan and Occitan. In his most recent project he is investigating dialect divergence in inflectional morphology, focussing on Romance languages. He is also preparing the chapter on the verb morphology of medieval Catalan for the Gramàtica del Català Antic. He has prepared for web publication the unfinished materials of the late R L Trask's Etymological Dictionary of Basque .