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Jared S. Klein

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Distinguished Research Professor

After majoring as an undergraduate in English and minoring in classics and math, I went to Yale to study linguistics and more or less stumbled into one of the leading centers of Indo-European Linguistics in the world. Since I had always had latent interests in this area, based upon my classical studies, I began to take courses with Warren Cowgill on general Indo-European and with Stanley Insler on Sanskrit. I wrote my dissertation on the particle u in the Rigveda, which launched my career as a scholar of Indo-European syntax and discourse structure. Most of my work has been on the language of the Rigveda, especially clausal connection, but I have also written on conjunction in Old Persian and Greek. A second area of interest is the comparative syntax of those old Indo-European languages whose primary or very early texts are translations of the Greek Gospels: Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavic. I have written monographic treatments of personal deixis and indefinite pronouns and polarity in Classical Armenian as well as conjunction and the lexical semantics of preverbs in Gothic. Since 1998 I have been involved in a project studying stylistic repetition in the Rigveda. I consider this an extension of my earlier studies.

My approach to Indo-European studies is heavily philological. My first impulse on any research project is to start with a text, mining it for whatever phenomenon I am interested in at the time.

Over the past year I have become deeply involved in the editorship of the de Gruyter Handbook of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, a massive project with 128 chapters and around 120 different authors. It will be the most extensive presentation of the field in nearly 100 years. I view this as a way to give something back to the field which has so engaged my energies over the past 45 years.

My current research goals are:

1) Editorship of the de Gruyter Handbook of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics

2) Stylistic Repetition in the Rigveda (a book-length study)

3) Interstanzaic Repetition in the Rigveda (a monograph)

4) Studies in the Comparative Syntax of the Greek, Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavic Gospels

Areas of Interest:
Specific Research Areas:

Historical linguistics, Indo-European syntax and discourse structure

Events featuring Jared S. Klein
Miller Learning Center Room 245

Linguistics faculty and former Director of the Program, Dr. Jared Klein will be presenting "Proto-Indo-European *nu as a Discourse Particle."

Articles Featuring Jared S. Klein

This past summer, Linguistics faculty and students represented UGA at several conferences. We are excited about all of the phenomenal research taking place in the department, and we would like to take the opportunity to recognize some of the projects that…

We congratulate Jared Klein, Distinguished Research Professor, on the completion of his 50th year as a faculty member at UGA. Dr. Klein joined the UGA Department of Classics in Fall 1972. A specialist in historical Indo-European linguistics focusing on syntax…

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