Faculty

Post-Doc

Lab Assistants

Visitors and Collaborators

---

Maria Polinsky, Professor of Linguistics
polinsky at fas.harvard.edu
departmental webpage

Research interests:

• language universals and their explanation
• comparative syntactic theory
• information structure in natural language
• incomplete acquisition (heritage languages)
• Austronesian and Caucasian languages

Carlos Gómez Gallo (website For FAS Help Desk: this website is under ~herpro, not ~cgallo. Even www.people.harvard.edu/~cgallo does not seem to work. Thanks)
cgallo@fas.harvard.edu

Research interests:

Carlos Gómez Gallo explores how individuals communicate in task-oriented dialogues. Important features of language emerge only when speakers have joint intentions and share a common visual ground. Not only can we study how listeners recover linguistic representations, but also to what degree speakers and listeners align such representations using dialogue. In this context of language as action, Carlos analyzes utterances beyond the sentence boundary in naturally occurring dialogues both from an experimental and computational perspective. Experimentally, he records human behavior during a task-based interaction to test hypothesis about how task complexity affects language. Computationally, he uses information theoretical principles to understand dialogue. Within this framework, he addresses questions such as: How do speakers translates a concept into an orderly stream of linguistic output? How does propositional complexity (in particular information content) affect the structure of the sentences in the discourse? If speech is incrementally assembled, how does a speaker plan their utterances?

Ekaterina Kravtchenko, UMass Amherst '08 Linguistics
ekravtch@fas.harvard.edu

Research interests:

• syntactic theory
• Russian linguistics

Jeremy Aron-Dine, Harvard '10 Linguistics
arondine@fas.harvard.edu

Dustin Heestand, Harvard '10 Linguistics
heestand at fas.harvard.edu

Sun-Hee Bae, Harvard
shbae@fas.harvard.edu

Jenny S. Lee, Harvard
lee37@fas.harvard.edu

Keith Plaster, Harvard
kplaster@fas.harvard.edu

Gözde Bahadir, Middle East Technical University
gbahadir@iq.harvard.edu
website

Ivano Caponigro, UCSD
ivano@ling.ucsd.edu
website

Kathryn Davidson, UCSD
kdavidson@ling.ucsd.edu
website

Suzanne Flynn, MIT Ann Gagliardi, UMD Boris Harizanov, UCSC Olga Kagan, UCLA Robert Kluender, UCSD

Sun-Hee Lee, Wellesley Silvina Montrul, UIUC Irina Sekerina, CUNY Staten Island Anne Sturgeon, UCSC Ming Xiang, University of Victoria