Diane Massam | |
---|---|
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Doctoral advisor | Noam Chomsky |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguistics |
Sub-discipline | Syntax of Niuean |
Institutions | University of Toronto |
Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist,Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
She earned her PhD in linguistics under Noam Chomsky [1] [2] in 1985 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [3] She held a position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto from 1989 until her retirement in 2017,when she became professor emeritus. [4] [5]
Massam specializes in the syntax of Niuean,an Austronesian language spoken in the South Pacific country of Niue. [6] She developed an analysis of a type of verb plus noun compounding called noun incorporation which has opened a window to analyze similar phenomena in other languages. Her analysis also proposed a novel way of understanding the relationship between a subject and its predicate.
She was a keynote speaker at the 21st annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) in 2014. [7]
She has served on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics,and on the Editorial Board of the journal Linguistic Inquiry .
Massam was appointed Vice-President of the Canadian Linguistic Association in 2015. Upon completion of her two-year term in this position she served as President of the CLA from 2017 to 2019. [8] [9]
In linguistics,syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order,grammatical relations,hierarchical sentence structure (constituency),agreement,the nature of crosslinguistic variation,and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
In linguistics,grammatical number is a feature of nouns,pronouns,adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions. English and other languages present number categories of singular or plural,both of which are cited by using the hash sign (#) or by the numero signs "No." and "Nos." respectively. Some languages also have a dual,trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
In linguistics,incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category,such as a verb,forms a compound with its direct object or adverbial modifier,while retaining its original syntactic function. The inclusion of a noun qualifies the verb,narrowing its scope rather than making reference to a specific entity.
The term predicate is used in two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject,and the other defines it as only the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus,by the first definition,the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake,while by the second definition,it is only the content verb likes,and Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. The conflict between these two definitions can lead to confusion.
In linguistic typology,a verb–object–subject or verb–object–agent language,which is commonly abbreviated VOS or VOA,is one in which most sentences arrange their elements in that order. That would be the equivalent in English to "Drank cocktail Sam." The relatively rare default word order accounts for only 3% of the world's languages. It is the fourth-most common default word order among the world's languages out of the six. It is a more common default permutation than OVS and OSV but is significantly rarer than SOV,SVO,and VSO. Families in which all or many of their languages are VOS include the following:
Saaroa or Lhaʼalua is a Southern Tsouic language spoken by the Saaroa (Hla'alua) people,an indigenous people of Taiwan. It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian family.
Elizabeth Cowper is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto.
Toba Batak is an Austronesian language spoken in North Sumatra province in Indonesia. It is part of a group of languages called Batak. There are approximately 1,610,000 Toba Batak speakers,living to the east,west and south of Lake Toba. Historically it was written using the Batak script,but the Latin script is now used for most writing.
The Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) is a learned society that hosts forums for collaborative research on Austronesian languages. Founded in 1994 at the University of Toronto,AFLA is now administered from the University of Western Ontario. Conferences are held annually at a multitude of institutes across the globe,including Tokyo University of Foreign Studies,Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,and Academia Sinica located in Taipei,Taiwan. The most recent 2019 conference was held in its home administration at the University of Western Ontario. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic,the AFLA 2020 conference was postponed and tentatively rescheduled for August 20 at the National University of Singapore.
Sandra (Sandy) Chung is an American linguist and distinguished professor emerita at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California,Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages and syntax.
Niina Ning Zhang is a theoretical linguist specializing in Mandarin Chinese syntax and semantics.
Eloise Jelinek was an American linguist specializing in the study of syntax. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona was titled "On Defining Categories:AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic". She was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1992.
Gillian Elizabeth Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist,and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Sankoff's notable former students include Miriam Meyerhoff.
Lisa deMena Travis is a researcher and educator in the field of linguistics,specializing in syntax and in the study of Austronesian languages such as Malagasy and Tagalog. She is currently a professor of linguistics at McGill University. Her 1984 proposal of the Head Movement Constraint,which seeks to account for limitations on the movement of syntactic heads in question formation,has become a cornerstone of generative linguistics.
Jila Ghomeshi is a Persian-Canadian linguist. She earned her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Toronto,under the supervision of Diane Massam. She is currently a professor of linguistics at the University of Manitoba,where she has been since 1998.
Maria “Masha”Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages.
Lisa Cheng is a linguist with specialisation in theoretical syntax. She is a Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language at the Department of Linguistics,Leiden University,and one of the founding members of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.
Hilda Judith Koopman is a linguist who does research and fieldwork in the areas of syntax and morphology. She is a professor in the department of Linguistics at the University of California,Los Angeles,and is the director of the SSWL database. The SSWL,which she together with Dennis Shasha inherited from Chris Collins at New York University NYU,is an open-ended database of syntactic,morphological,and semantic properties.
Gillian Ramchand is a linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Tromsø,Norway.
Tara Mohanan is a linguist and co-founder of ThinQ,an educational organisation. She is known for work on Hindi,Malayalam,and other South Asian languages in the fields of semantics,syntax,morphology,and phonology. Her husband is linguist K. P. Mohanan.