Eric Baković

Professor and Chair, Linguistics, UC San Diego


Pronouns: he, him, his / Why do pronouns matter?I respectfully acknowledge that we live and work on the land of the Kumeyaay/Kumiai nation. / Whose land are you on?

About my work

I’m most interested in phonological theory, which aims to formally characterize the set of possible human language sound patterns — and, in principle, only that set. Some of my most recent (and mainly collaborative) work questions claims about the outer limit of the set of possible phonological patterns (McCollum, Baković, Mai, & Meinhardt, 2020; Meinhardt, Mai, Baković, & McCollum, 2024), investigates the typological predictions made by specific constraint-based optimization systems (Mai & Baković, 2020, Baković & Mai 2021, Baković & Bennett, 2023), and defines a formal typology of process interactions and their relations to one another (Baković & Blumenfeld, 2019; Baković & Blumenfeld, 2024).

Recent work

… see a complete list of my works here.