Faculty of the Department of Linguistics 2007-08

Jasanoff, Jay H., Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology. Chair. PhD 1968, Harvard University.

Interests: Indo-European and general historical linguistics; linguistics of individual Indo-European branches (Germanic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, etc.).

Selected Works: “From reduplication to ablaut: the class VII strong verbs of Northwest Ger­manic,” to appear in Historische Sprachforschung (2008); “The origin of  the Latin gerund and gerundive: a new proposal,” to appear in the forthcoming Festschrift for Michael Flier (2008); “Balto-Slavic accentuation: telling news from noise,” Baltistica 39 (2005), 171-177; “Plus ça change. . . Lachmann’s Law in Latin,” in J. H. W. Penney, ed., Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies (Oxford and New York, 2004), 405-416; Hittite and the Indo-European Verb (Oxford, 2003).

Boeckx, Cedric, Associate Professor of Linguistics. PhD 2001, University of Connecticut.

Interests: Linguistics theory and the architecture of grammar; biolinguistics; theoretical and comparative syntax; Romance and Germanic syntax.

Selected Works: Bare Syntax. To appear. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Understanding Minimalist Syntax:  Lessons from Locality in Long-distance Dependencies (Blackwell, 2007); Aspects of the Syntax of Agreement (to appear, London: Routledge); Linguistic minimalism: Origins, Concepts, Methods, and Aims (2006, New York: Oxford University Press); Islands and Chains (2003, Amsterdam: John Benjamins); Multiple Wh-fronting (ed. with K. Grohmann)(2003, Amsterdam: John Benjamins); “Scope Reconstruction and A-movement,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19 (2001), 503-548; “Quirky Agreement,” Studia Linguistica 54 (2000), 451-480.

 

Chierchia, Gennaro, Haas Foundations Professor of Linguistics. PhD 1984, University of Massachusetts.

Interests:  Semantics, the Syntax/Semantics mapping, Pragmatics, Philosophy of Language, The interface of Semantics with Language Development, Language Pathology, and Language Processing.

Selected Works: "(In)Definites, Locality, and Intentional Identity" in G. Carlson and F. J. Pelletier, eds., Reference and Quantification: The Partee Effect (Stanford, 2006); "Scalar Implicatures, Polarity Phenomena and the Syntax/Pragmatics Interface" in A. Belletti, ed., Structures and Beyond (Oxford and New York, 2004); "Backwards vs. Forward Anaphora:  Reconstruction in Child Language", Language Acquisition, 8.2 (1999/2000), 129-170; "Reference to Kinds across Languages" (with M. T. Guasti), Natural Language Semantics 6 (1998), 339-405; Dynamics of Meaning. Anaphora, Presupposition and the Theory of Grammar, Chicago and London, 1995).

Flier, Michael S., Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology. PhD 1968, University of California, Berkeley.

Interests: Slavic linguistics, semiotics of medieval East Slavic culture.

Selected Works: “The Fourth Palatalization of Velars in Ukrainian:  The Southwestern Dialects,” in Alan J. Nussbaum, ed., Verba Docenti.  Studies in Historical and Indo-European Linguistics Presented to Jay H. Jasanoff by Students, Colleagues, and Friends (Ann Arbor and New York, 2007), 73-82; “Catching the Drift of Dissimilative Jakan’e,” in Michael S. Flier et al., eds., In Memoriam Henrik Birnbaum (Bloomington, 2006), 129–148; “Innovation in the East Slavic Non-Past: The Case of Belarusian First-Person Plural idom,” in Alan Timberlake, ed., American Contributions to the Thirteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, 2003. Vol. 1: Linguistics (Bloomington, 2003), 65–77; “Surzhyk: The Rules of Engagement,” in Zvi Gitelman et al., eds., Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk (Cambridge, 2000), 113–36. 

Huang, C.­T. James, Professor of Linguistics. Director of Graduate Studies. PhD 1982, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Interests: Syntactic theory, syntactic-semantics interface, Chinese linguistics.

Selected Works: "The distribution of negative NPs and some typological correlates," in A. Simpson an A. Li (eds.) Functional Structure(s), Form and Interpretation, Routledge (2003); "Distributivity and Reflexivity," in Sze-wing Tang and Luther Liu (eds.) The Formal Way to Chinese Languages, CSLI and Cambridge University Press (2002); Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of Grammar (Garland, 1998); New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics (with Y.-H. Audrey Li, Kluwer, 1996); "Two Types of Donkey Sentences," Natural Language Semantics (with Lisa Cheng, 1996); "Reconstruction and the Structure of VP" (Linguistic Inquiry, 1993).

Nevins, Andrew, Assistant Professor of Linguistics. PhD 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Interests: Morphology, the structure of the lexicon, phonology, experimental approaches to linguistics.

Selected Works: “The Representation of Third Person and its Consequences for Person-Case Effects,” to appear in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory; “Rule Application in Phonology” (with Morris Halle), to appear in Charles Cairns and Eric Raimy, eds., Contemporary Architectures in Phonological Theory; “A Distributed Morphology Analysis of Present Tense Auxiliaries in Zamudio” (with Karlos Arregi),  Euskalingua 9 (2006), 146-156; “Derivations without the Activity Condition,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology Working Papers in Linguistics 49 (2005); “Consonant Harmony in Karaim” (with Bert Vaux), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Working Papers in Linguistics 46 (2004).

Polinsky, Maria, Professor of Linguistics. PhD 1986, Institute for Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences.

Interests: Language universals and their explanation; comparative syntactic theory; the expression of information structure in natural language; incomplete acquisition (heritage languages); Austronesian languages (esp. Malagasy, Maori) and languages of the Caucasus (esp. Tsez, Kabardian).

Selected Works: “Expanding the Scope of Control & Raising” (with Eric Potsdam), to appear in Syntax; “Gender under incomplete acquisition,” to appear in Heritage Language Journal 6 (2007); “Without Aspect,” to appear in Greville Corbett and Michael Noonan, eds., Case and Grammatical Relations (Oxford); “Subject Preference in Korean” (with Nayoung Kwon and Robert Kluender), in Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon, eds., Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (Somerville, 2006), 1-14; “Word class distinctions in an incomplete grammar,” in Dorit Ravid and Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, eds., Perspectives on Language and Language Development (Dordrecht, 2005), 419-436. 

Rau, Jeremy, Associate Professor of Classics and Linguistics. PhD 2003, Cornell University.

Interests: Greek and Latin historical linguistics; Homeric language; Indo-European languages and linguistics; Indo-Iranian linguistics.

Selected Works: “The Derivational History of PGmc. *wethru- ‘lamb’,” in Alan J. Nussbaum, ed., Verba Docenti.  Studies in Historical and Indo-European Linguistics Presented to Jay H. Jasanoff by Students, Colleagues, and Friends (Ann Arbor and New York, 2007), 281-292; “The Greek Type nomas, -ados,” to appear in Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft; “The Origin of the Short-Vowel Inflection of the EU-Stems in Homer,” to appear in Glotta; “A Note on Mycenaean te-re-ja and the Athematic Inflection of the Contract Verbs,” to appear in Historische Sprachforschung; “PIE *woidu-/weidu- and its derivatives,” Die Sprache 40/2 (1998), 133-160.