Mark Hale is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 professor now teaching at Concordia University in Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

. He studies the methodology of historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

 and Austronesian linguistics.

He is a prominent figure in these fields. He has published numerous scholarly articleshttp://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mark+hale and bookshttp://books.google.com/books?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=Mark+hale&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES&lr=&as_vt=&as_auth=mark+hale&as_pub=&as_sub=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_isbn=&as_issn= on his research.

Selected publications

Hale, M. (2007), Historical linguistics: Theory and method, Oxford, Blackwell

Hale, M., & Reiss, C. (2008), The phonological enterprise, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hale, M.,(2004) Neogrammarian Sound Change, Chapter 7 in The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Edited by: Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, Blackwell