Randall Gess

Professor Emeritus

• B.A. (University of Texas), M.A. (University of Texas), Ph.D. (University of Washington)
• Email Randall Gess

Biography

December, 2026 will mark the 30th anniversary of my Phd in Linguistics from the University of Washington in Seattle!

If you are looking for my Maillardville Spoken French Corpus, you can find it here:

https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse/Gess_2006

COMING SOON:

In June, 2026, I completed, with Darya Kavistkaya (University of California, Berkeley), an article on Compensatory Lengthening that will appear soon in Wiley Blackwell’s highly anticipated 2nd edition of The Handbook of Phonology. In it, we propose a typology of phonological compensatory lengthening based on cases reported in a wide varieties of languages, past and present. We also survey current and previous theoretical approaches to compensatory lengthening and highlight the contributions they make towards achieving a full understanding of the process, in both its synchronic and diachronic dimensions.

My colleague Barbara Bullock (University of Texas, Austin) and I are finalizing a full draft of a textbook entitled Introduction to Linguistics through French. The textbook, under contract with Oxford University Press, will form part of a series of introductory resources for students who want to learn about linguistics with a focus on a specific language of interest to them, be it French, Italian, Chinese, Russian, etc. Our goal is to introduce students to the basic sub-disciplines of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax) as well as to the notion of linguistic variation as it applies to each of these, illustrating concepts throughout the book with examples from varieties of French worldwide. We expect the textbook to appear in 2027. 

Research Interests

I am currently researching principles and practices in the organization of higher education in Canada, the UK, France and Germany.

Principle research interests:

Phonological variation in French

Historical phonology of French