Principal Investigators
Maria Polinsky is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a theoretical syntactician with a strong interest in cross-linguistic variation. She has done extensive primary research on a number of languages, particularly in the Polynesian, Mayan, Daghestanian, and Kartvelian language families. She has a long-standing interest in ergativity which culminated in her book on the topic (Polinsky 2016) and a research agenda in heritage languages (Polinsky 2018). She has taught classes and directed dissertations on clausal dependencies and lately, on ellipsis. She currently directs the Guatemala Field Station (Polinsky 2019).
Eric Potsdam is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Florida. He is a theoretical syntactician with a strong interest in theory construction built on robust empirical investigations. He has taught syntax, morphology, and field methods at the University of Florida for 20 years. His research has focused on English and Austronesian languages, particularly Malagasy, and he has done field work on a range of African and Austronesian languages. Much of this research has been on clause structure, including the structure of non-declarative clauses such as interrogative, imperatives, and exclamatives.
Research Assistants
Maša Bešlin is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She works in the subfields traditionally called syntax and morphology, with an empirical focus on Slavic and Mayan languages. Her research has investigated such topics as the status of participles as a lexical category, locality constraints above and below the ‘word’ level, raising-to-subject constructions, bare-NP adverbials, case, and ellipsis.
Victoria Chen is a theoretical syntactician at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the variation and change in the syntax of western Austronesian languages. She has taught syntax, morphology, and historical linguistics and directed dissertations on comparative morphosyntax. She is particularly interested in the A vs A-bar distinction, agreement, phrasal movement, and voice.
Charlotte Gabitova is a Master’s student at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her main areas of interest are historical linguistics in Polynesia, long distance linguistic relation and the diachronic development of morphosyntactic alignment and voice systems. She hopes to do work in language revitalisation in the future, as well as looking into how autism interacts with linguistic systems.
Luané Lennox is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. Her main areas of interest concern theoretical and comparative syntax and morphology. She is curious about Agree and agreement, movement, A vs A’ distinctions, and the interaction between syntax and information structure. She has mostly worked with Germanic and Austronesian languages.
Polina Pleshak is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She works primarily in formal syntax and is particularly interested in Noun Phrase structure. The focus of her current research is on the syntax of small nominals, especially in locative phrases. She has worked on such topics as inherent vs. structural case asymmetry, case assignment within the nominal domain and differential object marking. This research is mostly based on her original fieldwork data from Finno-Ugric and Mayan languages.
Luisa Seguin is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a theoretical syntactician, interested in the syntactic encoding of information structure. Right now, she is working on how wh-movement and focus interact in different peripheries in Valdôtain Patois, a Franco-Provençal language. For the current project, she is investigating exceptives in her native language: Italian.
Kevin Yu is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida. His interests are in word order, clause structure, and non-configurational languages. In the past, he has conducted research on Karuk (an indigenous language of California) and Ekegusii (a Bantu language spoken in Kenya).