John Haiman is currently the director of the Linguistics Program at Macalester.
Haiman has done research on syntactic change in Germanic languages, the grammar of Hua
(Papua New Guinea), iconicity in syntax, the rhaeto-romance languages of Switzerland and
Italy, and Khmer. He is the author of Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation and the
Evolution of Language. 

EDUCATION: B.A., University of Toronto, 1967; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1971. 

John Haiman has been teaching at Macalester since 1989.

Journal Articles

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The creation of new words, Linguistics (2010)
 

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“Nouns, Verbs and Syntactic Backsliding in Khmer.” (with N. Ourn), Studies in Language (2003)
 

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"Coordinate Compounds and Khmer Phrase Structure." (with N. Ourn), Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Papers (2000)
 

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"Symmetrical Compounds in Khmer." (with N. Ourn), Studies in Language (2000)
 

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"Auxiliation in Khmer: The Case of Baan.", Studies in Language (1999)
 

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Books

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Talk is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language (1998)
 

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Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón (with J. Bybee and S.A. Thompson) (1997)
 

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The Rhaeto-Romance Languages (with P. Benincà) (1992)
 

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Hua-English Dictionary with an English-Hua Index (1991)
 

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Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse (with S.A. Thompson) (1988)
 

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Contributions to Books

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Competing motivations, Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology (2011)
 

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Iconicity vs. grammaticalization: A case study, The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (2011)
 

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Ergativity in Sorani Kurdish, Essais de typologie et de linguistique générale : mélanges offerts à Denis Creissels (2010)
 

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Decorative symmetry in ritual (and everyday) language, Formulaic language (2009)
 

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"Iconicity", Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (2003)
 

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