Michael Putnam

Michael T. Putnam is Professor of German & Linguistics at Penn State University. Putnam’s research focuses on the structure of Germanic languages past and present, from both formal and experimental perspectives. He has a particular interest in the diasporic varieties of Germanic languages and issues related to bi/multilingualism more generally. He has published widely on issues related to syntax, morphology, and their interfaces, and has edited several volumes and books, including the Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics (2020) (with B. Richard Page) and Formal approaches to complexity in heritage language grammars (2024) (with Maria Polinsky), and has authored dozens of other scholarly articles and books, such as The Structural Design of Language (2013) (with Thomas S. Stroik) and Unbounded Dependency Constructions: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives (2021) (with Rui P. Chaves).