Biography
Krishnan Ram-Prasad is a first year PhD student in Classics supervised by Dr Rupert Thompson, Prof James Clackson and Dr Vincenzo Vergiani. His research focuses on how we can use Generative (Chomskyan) Grammar to inform our syntactic analysis of Proto-Indo-European. His Masters thesis presented a Generative analysis of "local particles" in Sanskrit, allowing for theoretically sound syntactic comparison with other Indo-European languages with the aim of reconstructing the behaviour these elements in Proto-Indo-European. His PhD takes this idea, and applies it to a wider ranger of languages and linguistic data. In particular, he is looking at applying Generativist theories of syntactic change to reconstruction.
Other academic interests
Grammaticalisation theory; Sound change; the Sabellic languages; integrating Sanskrit into the Classics ("Post-areal Classical Studies")
