Contact Information

Office: 4037 JFSB

Phone: 422-3482

E-mail: royal_skousen@byu.edu

Royal Skousen has taught at BYU since 1979. In 1972 he received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Professor Skousen has also taught at the University of Texas (1972-1979) and as a visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego 0981). The following year he was a Fulbright lecturer in Finland. He serves on the editorial boards of Computers and the Humanities and Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, and has been a consultant for Houghton Mifflin, ITT, WordPerfect, Collins Publishers, Novell, and others. He was the linguistic consultant for Houghton Mifflin's grades 1-8 spelling program (1982. 1985). Recently he wrote two major books on analogy as an alternative to rule descriptions of language: Analogical Modeling of Language (1989) and Analogy and Structure (1992), both published by Kluwer. In 1975 Mouton published his Substantive Evidence in Phonology. He is also the author of over fifty journal articles and other publications in such areas as the empirical basis of linguistic theory, mathematical linguistics, phonological theory, morphology of Finnish, French, and Fula (a West African language), the Kalevala (the national epic of Finland), English grammar (especially prescriptivism), English spelling, analogical modeling, language of the Mormon scriptures, and textual criticism of the Book of Mormon. Since 1988 he has been the editor of the Book of Mormon critical text project. He plans to publish a four-volume critical text of the Book of Mormon beginning in 1998. By careful examination of the original and printer's manuscripts of the Book of Mormon, as well as twenty printed editions of the book, he has discovered hundreds of hitherto unknown readings in the text. He has also discovered the location of numerous additional (and legitimate) fragments of the original manuscript and has arranged for their conservation and photography.