Van Valin also departs from Chomskyan syntactic theory by not allowing abstract underlying forms or transformational rules and derivations.
He is currently on leave from Buffalo and is Professor of General Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.
He has been a visiting researcher at the Australian National University and at the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
He had an NSF-funded research project with Daniel Everett on information structure in Amazonian languages from 2003–2006.
He has published eight books: Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar,[2] Advances in Role and Reference Grammar,[3] Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Function,[4] An Introduction to Syntax,[5] Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface,[6] Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,[7] Information Structuring of Spoken Language from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective,[8] Nominal anchoring: Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages,[9] and, The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar,[10] He has more than 100 publications.