The Contributors

Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the section of General Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona, as well as the Center for Complexity Science at the same university. He is the author of numerous books, including Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006, OUP), Bare Syntax (2008, OUP), Language in Cognition (2010, Wiley-Blackwell), and Elementary Syntactic Structures (2014, CUP). He is the editor of OUP’s Studies in Biolinguistics series.

Carlo Cecchetto is a graduate of the University of Milan and has held posts in Siena and Milan. He is currently Directeur de recherche at CNRS (UMR 7023, Paris VIII). He has published two monographs, has edited several collections of articles and has co-authored over 40 articles in academic journals on topics ranging from natural language syntax and semantics to sign language and the neuropsychology of language.

Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics at MIT and Director of the ‘MIT–Haiti Initiative’ funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is also a founding member of Haiti’s Haitian Creole Academy. He studies Creole languages, focusing on his native Haitian Creole. His research deepens our understanding of the history and structures of Creole languages. His analyses show that Creole languages, often described as ‘exceptional’ or ‘lesser,’ are fundamentally on a par with non-Creole languages in terms of historical development, grammatical structures, and expressive capacity. His research projects bear on social justice as well. In DeGraff’s vision, Creole languages and other so-called ‘local’ languages constitute a necessary ingredient for sustainable development, equal opportunity, and dignified citizenship for their speakers—a position that is often undermined by theoretical claims that contribute to the marginalization of these languages, especially in education and administration.

Janet Dean Fodor has a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, and has taught at the University of Connecticut as well as at the City University of New York, where she is Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center. She is the author of a textbook on semantics and of a 1979 monograph republished recently in Routledge Library Editions. Her research—in collaboration with many students and colleagues—includes studies of human sentence processing in a variety of languages, focusing most recently on the role of prosody in helping (or hindering) syntactic analysis, including the ‘implicit prosody’ that is mentally projected in silent reading. Another research interest, represented in this volume, is the modeling of grammar acquisition. She was a founder of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, now in its 29th year. She is a former president of the Linguistic Society of America and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Eric Fuß graduated from the Goethe University Frankfurt and has held positions at the Universities of Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Leipzig. He is currently Senior Researcher at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany. He has written three monographs and (co-)edited several volumes of articles. His primary research interests are language change, linguistic variation, and the interface between syntax and morphology.

Kleanthes K. Grohmann received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is currently Professor of Biolinguistics at the University of Cyprus. He has published widely in the areas of syntactic theory, comparative syntax, language acquisition, impaired language, and multilingualism. Among the books he has written and (co-)edited are Understanding Minimalism (with N. Hornstein and J. Nunes, 2005, CUP), InterPhases (2009, OUP), and The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (with Cedric Boeckx, 2013, CUP). He is founding co-editor of the John Benjamins book series Language Faculty and Beyond, editor of the open-access journal Biolinguistics, and Director of the Cyprus Acquisition Team (CAT Lab).

Cristina Guardiano is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia. She specialized in historical syntax at the Università di Pisa, where she got her Ph.D., with a dissertation about the internal structure of DPs in Ancient Greek. She is active in research on the parametric analysis of nominal phrases, the study of diachronic and dialectal syntactic variation, crosslinguistic comparison, and phylogenetic reconstruction. She is a member of the Syntactic Structures of the World’s Languages (SSWL) research team, and a project advisor in the ERC Advanced Grant ‘LanGeLin’.

Maria Teresa Guasti is a graduate of the University of Geneva and has held posts in Geneva, Milano San Raffaele, and Siena. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She is author of several articles in peer-reviewed journals, of book chapters, one monograph, one co-authored book, and one second-edition textbook. She is Associate Investigator at the ARC-CCD, Macquarie University, Sydney and Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Child Health, Haidan District, Beijing. She has participated in various European Actions and has been Principal Investigator of the Crosslinguistic Language Diagnosis project funded by the European Community.

Marc D. Hauser is the President of Risk-Eraser, LLC, a company that uses cognitive and brain sciences to impact the learning and decision making of at-risk children, as well as the schools and programs that support them. He is the author of several books, including The Evolution of Communication (1996, MIT Press), Wild Minds (2000, Henry Holt), Moral Minds (2006), and Evilicious (2013, Kindle Select, CreateSpace), as well as over 250 publications in refereed journals and books.

Wolfram Hinzen is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research (ICREA) and is affiliated with the Linguistics Department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He writes on issues in the interface of language and mind. He is the author of the OUP volumes Mind Design and Minimal Syntax (2006), An Essay on Names and Truth (2007), and The Philosophy of Universal Grammar (with Michelle Sheehan, 2013), as well as co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012).

Anders Holmberg received his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1987 and is currently Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at Newcastle University, having previously held positions in Morocco, Sweden, and Norway. His main research interests are in the fields of comparative syntax and syntactic theory, with a particular focus on the Scandinavian languages and Finnish. His publications include numerous articles in journals such as Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, Theoretical Linguistics, and Studia Linguistica, and several books, including (with Theresa Biberauer, Ian Roberts, and Michelle Sheehan) Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory (2010, CUP) and The Syntax of Yes and No (2016, OUP).

C.-T. James Huang received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1982 and has held teaching positions at the University of Hawai’i, National Tsing Hua University, Cornell University, and University of California before taking up his current position as Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He has published extensively, in articles and monographs, on subjects in syntactic analysis, the syntax–semantics interface, and parametric theory. He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, an academician of Academia Sinica, and founding co-editor of Journal of East Asian Linguistics (1992–present).

Maria Kambanaros, a certified bilingual speech pathologist with 30 years clinical experience, is Associate Professor of Speech Pathology at Cyprus University of Technology. Her research interests are related to language and cognitive impairments across neurological and genetic pathologies (e.g., stroke, dementia, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, specific language impairment, syndromes). She has published in the areas of speech pathology, language therapy, and (neuro)linguistics, and directs the Cyprus Neurorehabilitation Centre.

Howard Lasnik is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where he has also held the title Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. He is Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and serves on the editorial boards of eleven journals. He has published eight books and over 100 articles, mainly on syntactic theory, learnability, and the syntax–semantics interface, especially concerning phrase structure, anaphora, ellipsis, verbal morphology, Case, and locality constraints. He has supervised 57 completed Ph.D. dissertations, on morphology, on language acquisition, and, especially, on syntactic theory.

Jeffrey L. Lidz is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. His main research interests are in language acquisition, syntax, and psycholinguistics and his many publications include articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Journal of Memory and Language, Language Acquisition, Language Learning and Development, Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language Semantics, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. He is currently editor in chief of Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics and is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics.

Terje Lohndal is Professor of English Linguistics (100%) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and Professor II (20%) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2012. His work focuses on formal grammar and language variation, but he also has interests in philosophy of language and neuroscience. He has published a monograph with Oxford University Press, and many papers in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Semantics, and Journal of Linguistics. In addition to research and teaching, Lohndal is also involved with numerous outreach activities and is a regular columnist in Norwegian media on linguistics and the humanities.

Giuseppe Longobardi is Anniversary Professor of Linguistics at the University of York and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant ‘Meeting Darwin’s last challenge: Toward a global tree of human languages and genes’ (2012–2017). He has done research in theoretical and comparative syntax, especially on the syntax/ontology relation in nominal expressions. He is interested in quantitative approaches to language comparison and phylogenetic linguistics, and is active in interdisciplinary work with genetic anthropologists. Over the past ten years he has contributed the design of three innovative research programs (Topological Mapping theories, Parametric Minimalism, and the Parametric Comparison Method).

Peter Ludlow has published on a number of topics at the intersection of the philosophy of language and linguistics. His publications include The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (OUP, 2011) and Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and the Dynamic Lexicon (OUP, 2014). He has taught at State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, and Northwestern University.

James McGilvray is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. He has published articles in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind and has written and edited several books and articles on the works of Noam Chomsky and their philosophical, moral, and scientific foundations and implications. He is currently editing a second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky focusing primarily on change and progress in Chomsky’s work during the last ten years.

Brett Miller is Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri–Columbia. His interests include the role of phonetics in explaining the behaviors of phonological features; historical phonology, especially where laryngeal contrasts are concerned; and pragmatic functions of syntax in Ancient Greek. He also enjoys teaching linguistic typology and the history of the English language.

Neil Myler is Assistant Professor of linguistics at Boston University. He received his doctorate from New York University in 2014, under the supervision of Prof. Alec Marantz, with a thesis entitled ‘Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences.’ His research interests include morphosyntax, morphophonology, microcomparative syntax (particularly with respect to English dialects and languages of the Quechua family), argument structure, and the morphosyntax and semantics of possession cross-linguistically.

Frederick J. Newmeyer specializes in syntax and the history of linguistics and has as his current research program the attempt to synthesize the results of formal and functional linguistics. He was Secretary-treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) from 1989 to 1994 and its President in 2002. He has been elected Fellow of the LSA and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2011 he received a Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Emeritus Faculty.

Luigi Rizzi teaches linguistics at the University of Geneva and at the University of Siena. He was on the faculty of MIT and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). His research interests involve theoretical and comparative syntax, with special reference to the theory of locality, the study of syntactic invariance and variation, the cartography of syntactic structures, and the theory-guided study of language acquisition. His main publications include the monographs Issues in Italian Syntax and Relativized Minimality, and the article ‘The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.’

Ian Roberts is a graduate of the University of Southern California and has held posts in Geneva, Bangor, and Stuttgart. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He has published six monographs and two textbooks, and has edited several collections of articles. He was president of Generative Linguistics of the Old World (GLOW) in 1993–2001, and of the Societas Linguistica Europeea in 2012–2013. He is currently Principle Investigator on the European Reserach Council Advanced Grant Rethinking Comparative Syntax.

William G. Sakas has an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the City University of New York (CUNY). He is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Hunter College and is on the doctoral faculties of Linguistics and Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is the Co-founding Director of the Computational Linguistics Masters and Doctoral Certificate Program. He has recently become active in computer science education both at the college and pre-college levels. His research focuses on computational modeling of human language: What are the consequential components of a computational model and how do they correlate with psycholinguistic data and human mental capacities?

Bridget D. Samuels is Senior Editor at the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology, University of Southern California. She is the author of Phonological Architecture: A Biolinguistic Perspective (2011, OUP), as well as numerous other publications in biological, historical, and theoretical linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 2009 and has taught at Harvard, the University of Maryland, and Pomona College.

Bonnie D. Schwartz is Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. Her research has examined the nature of second language acquisition from a generative perspective. More recently, she has focused on child second language acquisition and how it may differ from that of adults.

Rex A. Sprouse received his Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics from Princeton University. He has taught at Bucknell University, Eastern Oregon State College, and Harvard University and is now Professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University. In the field of generative approaches to second language acquisition, he is perhaps best known for his research on the L2 initial state and on the role of Universal Grammar in the L2 acquisition of properties of the syntax–semantics interface.

Ianthi Maria Tsimpli is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She works on language development in the first and second language in children and adults, language impairment, attrition, bilingualism, language processing, and the interaction between language, cognitive abilities, and print exposure.

George Tsoulas graduated from Paris VIII in 2000 and is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of York. He has published extensively on formal syntax and the syntax–semantics interface. He has edited and authored books on quantification, distributivity, the interfaces of syntax with semantics and morphology and diachronic syntax. His work focuses on Greek and Korean syntax and semantics, as well as questions and the integration of syntax with gesture. He is currently working on a monograph on Greek particles.

Juan Uriagereka has been Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland since 2000. He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Konstanz, Tsukuba, and the Basque country. He is the author of Syntactic Anchors: On Semantic Structure and of Spell-Out and the Minimalist Program, and co-author, with Howard Lasnik, of A Course in Minimalist Syntax. He is also co-editor, with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Pello Salaburu, of Of Minds and Language.

Bert Vaux is Reader in phonology and morphology at Cambridge University and Fellow of King’s College. He is primarily interested in phenomena that shed light on the structure and origins of the phonological component of the grammar, especially in the realms of psychophonology, historical linguistics, microvariation, and nanovariation. He also enjoys working with native speakers to document endangered languages, especially varieties of Armenian, Abkhaz, and English.