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 and professor emerita 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 emerita. [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 pseudo-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]
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