Summary of Current Research

Faculty

Faculty

• Mürvet Enç
  
  
• Yafei Li - Professor Li's specialty is in syntax and the syntax-morphology interface. His recent publications have investigated the syntactic and morphological representations of causativity and the possibility of formulating a unified theory of various morpho-syntactic phenomena such as causativization, noun incorporation, applicatives, and word-order typology. He is currently working on the nature of lexical categorization in dialects of Chinese where there are words that simultaneously exhibit the behaviors of nouns and postpositions. He is also collaborating with two other faculty members to study the neurological reality of universal linguistic principles such as relativized minimality.
  
  
• Vivian Lin
  
  
• Monica Macaulay - Professor Macaulay's main area of interest is the morphology of American Indian languages. She has worked on Mixtec (Otomanguean) and Karuk (Hokan), and currently works on Menominee (Algonquian). Topics she has looked at include obviation, reduplication, and inverse marking. She is also interested in language and gender, and has done research on gender bias and stereotyping in example sentences in syntax textbooks.
  
  
• Marlys Macken
  
  
• Thomas Purnell - Professor Purnell's main area of interest is metrical theory and the interaction of phonological tone and stress, particularly in languages with tone displacement or tone spread. His research and teaching examines the interface between phonetics and phonology, and the cognition of non-phonological phonetic gestures (dialect differences, e.g.). Also, he is interested in the intersection of racially-affiliated social groups and sound systems of language, particularly the judgments people make about a speaker's perceived racial affiliation in the absence of visual cues.
  
  
• Rand Valentine - Professor Valentine is currently working on a dictionary project with Mary Ann Corbiere of the University of Sudbury (Sudbury, Ontario), based on Richard Rhodes' outstanding dictionary of eastern varieties of Ojibwe (Rhodes, Richard. 1993. Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary. New York: Mouton de Gruyter). He is also involved with various Algonquian language-documentation projects, especially computational aspects of lexicographical research.