David Goldstein

David Goldstein

Professor of Linguistics, Indo-European Studies, and Classics

University of California, Los Angeles

I hold a joint position in the Department of Linguistics and the Program in Indo-European Studies at UCLA, along with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Classics. My research centers on two main areas. One line of work applies computational phylogenetics and statistical modeling to the study of language change and sociocultural evolution. The other explores how language change informs linguistic theory, with a focus on syntactic and semantic change in Indo-European.

From December 2022 through July 2023, I was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and during Easter Term 2023, I served as a Lewis-Gibson Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies. For 2025-26, I will be a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS).

I am honored to be a member of the 2021 cohort of Guggenheim Fellows.

Download my CV.

Interests

  • Computational phylogenetics
  • Syntactic, morphosyntactic, and semantic change
  • Indo-European
  • Quantitative methods
  • Corpus linguistics

Education

  • Ph.D., 2010

    University of California, Berkeley

  • M.A., 2004

    University of California, Berkeley

  • M.Phil., 2002

    University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College

  • B.A., 2000

    Amherst College

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