People

Alec Marantz

Alec Marantz is a Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU, which he joined in 2006 from MIT, where he had been Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Linguistics. He served as Chair of the Linguistics department at NYU from 2007-2013.

Co-founder of the theory of the architecture of grammar known as Distributed Morphology, Professor Marantz is world-renowned for his work on morphology and syntax, and more recently, his work on neurolinguistics, carried out at NYU in Neuroscience of Language Lab (NeLLab), located jointly in the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology. Within NeLLab, Marantz focuses on word structure and innovative MEG (magnetoencephalography) methods for functional neuroimaging. Integrating linguistic theory and psycholinguistic models with observed neural activity in the brain, this work explores: how the ability to use natural language is implemented in the brain; how the brain mediates the most critical aspects of our communication system; and which properties of the mind/brain facilitate the seemingly effortless human processing of language. Existing research in this field is typically based on the English language. Therefore, a particularly innovative aspect of Marantz’s work is located in the NYU Abu Dhabi site of NeLLab, the lab's location in Abu Dhabi. This has a focus on speakers of Arabic, a language of special importance for the study of the neural correlates of linguistic representations and computations, as well as many other languages, such as Hindi, Greek, Hebrew, and Tagalog.

Neil Myler

Neil Myler is an Associate Professor of linguistics at Boston University. His research interests include morphology, (micro-)comparative syntax, the interaction between syntax and morphophonology, argument structure, the morphosyntax and semantics of possession, Quechua morphology and syntax, and English dialect syntax. Fieldwork plays an important role in my investigations of all these things.

Officially, his job is to be BU's resident morphologist, but he takes the position that morphology cannot be understood except in terms of how it fits into the architecture of the grammar as a whole. He believes the most fruitful approach to this question is one in which syntax generates all complex expressions — both "words" and "phrases" — and morphophonology interprets the output of the syntactic component. This is the position taken by Distributed Morphology, the theory assumed in most of his work so far.

Jim Wood

Jim Wood is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 2012. His research revolves around issues of syntactic theory and its interactions with semantics and morphology, with a special empirical focus on Icelandic and dialect variation in English. His work on Icelandic covers a wide range of phenomena, much of which revolves around issues of case marking and verb phrase structure (causatives, passives, middles, argument structure, dative-nominative constructions), but also includes the structure of noun phrases, interpretation of pronouns, and the syntax of clitics. In 2012, he came to Yale and took on a leading role in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, which focuses on “syntactic microvariation” in English—tiny differences between dialects of English. In this area, he has worked and published on the syntax of numerous constructions, and he has been developing new ways of investigating, mapping, and quantitatively analyzing syntactic dialect variation. Since 2013, he has been the Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, and his research has been published in a wide range of journals, including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistic Variation, American Speech, Glossa, and Lingua, among others. He is an ongoing member of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, and Íslenska málfræðifélagið (the Icelandic Linguistic Society).

Ruth Kramer

Ruth Kramer is an Associate Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Professor Kramer's research is primarily in theoretical syntax and morphology, with particular interests in grammatical gender, number, syncretisms, clitic doubling, and the morphosyntax of agreement, and the fine line between haplology and multiple exponence. The languages that Professor Kramer specializes in are mostly members of the Afroasiatic language family, with a special emphasis on Amharic (Ethiosemitic).

Maria Gouskova

Maria Gouskova is a Professor of Linguistics at NYU. Her research is on phonology, morphology, and their interface, with a particular interest in patterned exceptions and minor rules: their grammatical analysis, the extent to which these rules are productive, and how speakers learn the rules. The learnability of lexical subpatterns interacts with other phonological and morphological learning problems, so a related area of interest is in modeling the various kinds of phonological learning, both theoretically and computationally.

Laura Kalin

Laura Kalin is an Associate Professor in the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, which she joined in 2016. In Fall 2023, She became the Associate Director of the Program, and since Fall 2024, she has been the Acting Director of the Program. Her research interests are mainly in syntax and morphology, especially allomorphy, infixation, agreement, and nominal licensing, with a new interest in root and pattern morpho-phono-syntax. She investigates these topics through typological research and case studies on a variety of languages, which has included Turoyo and Senaya (Neo-Aramaic), Nancowry (Austroasiatic), Kurmanji (Indo-Iranian), Malagasy (Austronesian), and Hixkaryana (Carib).

Jonathan David Bobaljik

Jonathan Bobaljik is a Professor of Linguists at Harvard University. His research interests include morphology, syntax, endangered languages, Germanic, Slavic, Arctic Languages. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995, and he has previously held positions at McGill University and University of Connecticut.

David Embick

David Embick is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research areas are syntactic theory, morphological theory (Distributed Morphology), the syntax/morphology interface, syntax and phonological form, event/argument structure and "lexical" knowledge, language and the brain; MEG; language and autism.

Johanna Benz

Johanna Benz is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University. Dr. Benz recently completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Dave Embick, and previously received a BA and an MA at Universität Leipzig. Dr. Benz' work focuses on syntactic word formation and its relationship to the rest of the syntax, semantics, and phonology.

Maša Bešlin

Maša Bešlin a Postdoctoral Associate in Syntax in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University. Dr. Bešlin has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, where she was advised by Masha Polinsky and Dave Embick. Very broadly, she is interested in exploring what the combinatorial limits of natural language tell us about its general properties. Her research is primarily in syntax and its interfaces with form and meaning, with an empirical focus on Slavic and Mayan languages. Topics that she has worked on include mixed categories (participles and nominalizations), locality in syntax and at the interfaces, ellipsis, tense/aspect systems, allomorphy, raising, and issues in the extended projection of noun phrases (case, the NP/DP debate).

Heather Newell

Heather Newell is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Université du Québec à Montréal. Professor Newell's research interests include phonological theory, the phonology-syntax interface, stress systems, phases/derivational cyclicity, Native-American languages (primarily Ojibwe).