In December 2017, he retired as director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
[2] Among other distinctions, he is winner of the 1992 Stirling Prize, Fellow-elect of the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, member of the Academia Europaea, and 2009 Hale Professor of the Linguistic Society of America.
The group has played a pioneering role in developing the field of semantic typology and new models of language documentation.
The department has also done work connecting typology with Conversation Analysis through studies on e.g. repair[5] and sequence organization[6] across a wide variety of language.
His recent work describes the relations between culture of the inhabitants of Rossel Island, and their Yélî Dnye language.