Hilda Koopman

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Hilda Judith Koopman
Born1953
Nationality American and French
Alma materB.A., University of Amsterdam;, B.A, University of Amsterdam:, Ph.D., University of Tilburg
Scientific career
Fields Linguistics
Institutions University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA
Academic advisors Henk van Riemsdijk, [1] Kenneth Hale

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 (Syntactic and Semantic Structures of the World's Languages) [2] [3] [4] 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.

Contents

Research interests

Hilda Koopman is interested in both theoretical linguistics and field linguistics. Her area of specialization includes linguistic theory, fieldwork, syntax, morphology, comparative syntax As a field linguists, she has worked on various (un(der)described) languages. Some of the languages and language family she has worked on include the following: Kru languages (Vata, Dida, Gbadi..), Gur (Nawdem), Mande (Bambara), Kwa (Abe(y)..), Grassfield Bantu (Nweh, Ncufie, Bafanji), West Atlantic language (Wolof, Fulani), Bantu (Ndendeule, Siswati), Nilotic (Maasai, Dholuo), Austronesian languages (Malagasy, Javanese, Samoan, Tongan), Creole languages (Haitian, Sranan, Saramaccan).

Career

Koopman has been a professor of Linguistics at UCLA since 1985. [5] [6] She served on the editorial boards of Oxford University Press (comparative syntax), Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Book series), Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syntax</span> System responsible for combining morphemes into complex structures

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Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:

Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.

<i>Syntactic Structures</i> Book by Noam Chomsky

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Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treebank</span>

In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data.

In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For example, in the sentence "Susan ate an apple", Susan is the doer of the eating, so she is an agent; an apple is the item that is eaten, so it is a patient.

Meaning–text theory (MTT) is a theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of models of natural language. The theory provides a large and elaborate basis for linguistic description and, due to its formal character, lends itself particularly well to computer applications, including machine translation, phraseology, and lexicography.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not exclusively employ scientific methods.

<i>Aspects of the Theory of Syntax</i> 1965 book by Noam Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.

The lexical integrity hypothesis (LIH) or lexical integrity principle is a hypothesis in linguistics which states that syntactic transformations do not apply to subparts of words. It functions as a constraint on transformational grammar.

Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity. The subject also carries importance for language evolution.

Ljubov Zinovjevna Sova is a Russian philologist notable for contributions in the field of linguistics and orientalistics. Her main fields of professional interest include linguistics, African philology, semiotics, typology, Slavic languages and journalism.

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Anna Maria Di Sciullo is a professor in the Linguistics Department at the Université du Québec à Montréal and visiting scientist at the Department of Linguistics at New York University. Her research areas are Theoretical Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Biolinguistics.

Maria “Masha” Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages.

In linguistics, the autonomy of syntax is the assumption that syntax is arbitrary and self-contained with respect to meaning, semantics, pragmatics, discourse function, and other factors external to language. The autonomy of syntax is advocated by linguistic formalists, and in particular by generative linguistics, whose approaches have hence been called autonomist linguistics.

Jonathan David Bobaljik is a Canadian linguist specializing in morphology, syntax, and typology. Bobaljik received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 with a thesis titled Morphosyntax: The syntax of verbal inflection advised by Noam Chomsky and David Pesetsky. He is currently a professor at Harvard University and has previously held positions at McGill University and University of Connecticut. He is a leading scholar in the area of Distributed Morphology.

References

  1. "Henk van Riemsdijk CV" (PDF).
  2. "Yale Linguistics". 5 January 2013.
  3. "Linguist List". 2 June 2009.
  4. "Linguist List Newstter".
  5. "UCLA faculty".
  6. "Hilda Koopman CV" (PDF).