Dr. Tim Thornes joined the linguistics faculty in the Department of English at Boise State University in 2012. He earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Oregon where he developed his interests in language typology, language documentation, and Native American languages. In 2003, he completed a comprehensive grammar of the Northern Paiute language as a dissertation. His earlier experience includes a B.A. in English (writing emphasis) from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota and three years working as a primary school construction supervisor as a Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon. He has taught linguistics at the University of Oregon and University of Central Arkansas. He has presented and published widely on aspects of Northern Paiute grammatical structures while exploring their relationships both within the ecology of the language and from a cross-linguistic, typological perspective.
Books
Functional-Historical Approaches to Explanation: In Honor of Scott DeLancey (2013)
Contributions from both well-known practitioners and new voices in the areas of language typology, historical...
Contributions to Books
Causation as "Functional Sink" in Northern Paiute, Functional-Historical Approaches to Explanation: In Honor of Scott DeLancey (2013)
Two morphological constructions operate within the broad, functional domain of causation in Northern Paiute (Numic;...
Functional Underpinnings of Diachrony in Relative Clause Formation: The Relativization-Nominalization Connection in Northern Paiute, Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas: A Typological Overview (2012)
Dimensions of Northern Paiute Multi-verb Constructions, Multi-verb Constructions : A View from the Americas (2011)
Historical Pathways in Northern Paiute Verb Formation, New Challenges in Typology : Transcending the Borders and Refining the Distinctions (2009)
Book Reviews
Ute Reference Grammar. Talmy Givón. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011, Anthropological Linguistics (2012)
Numic languages constitute a major branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Despite more than a...
Presentations
Language Documentation and the Discourse Bases of Grammar: On the Northern Paiute Applicative Construction, Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Arkansas Philological Association, University of Central Arkansas (2011)