Yves Roberge is professor of linguistics in the French Department at the University of Toronto. He received a BA in French Studies in 1981 and an MA in linguistics in 1983, both from the University of Sherbrooke, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia in 1986. Roberge served as Principal of New College from 2010 through 2017. [1]
Roberge researches the syntax and semantics of French and other Romance languages, especially Canadian French, as well as dialectal variation, first language acquisition, and the syntax-morphology interface. [2] He is well known for his work on implicit (or silent) arguments, which he has studied from both a theoretical perspective and an acquisition perspective, and which is the subject of his book The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments, published in 1990. [3]
In 2015, Roberge received the National Achievement Award presented by the Canadian Linguistic Association. [4]
Robert D. Van Valin Jr. is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics, and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages.
Generative grammar, or generativism, is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving from logical syntax and glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. It is a system of explicit rules that may apply repeatedly to generate an indefinite number of sentences which can be as long as one wants them to be. The difference from structural and functional models is that the object is base-generated within the verb phrase in generative grammar. This purportedly cognitive structure is thought of as being a part of a universal grammar, a syntactic structure which is caused by a genetic mutation in humans.
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent ("subject") of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages. It has also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages. Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative and those that—on top of being ergative morphologically—also show ergativity in syntax. No language has been recorded in which both the morphological and syntactical ergative are present. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet it displays accusative alignment with certain pronouns.
In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages characterized by a flat phrase structure, which allows syntactically discontinuous expressions, and a relatively free word order.
Elizabeth Cowper is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto.
The Canadian Linguistic Association is the principal professional organization of linguists in Canada. Yearly meetings are held, usually at the end of May, in which members present scholarly research on any area of Linguistics. Every year since 2011, a new exhibit of the Canadian Language Museum has also opened at the annual meeting. The CLA also publishes the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, which is published quarterly. The association was founded in 1954.
Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Donna B. Gerdts is professor of linguistics and associate director of the First Nations Languages Program at Simon Fraser University. She is a syntactician who has worked most extensively on Halkomelem and Korean. She has created extensive teaching materials for Halkomelem, and is currently engaged in further research on the language, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Some of her key areas of interest are: syntactic theory, language typology and universals, the syntax/morphology interface, and the form and function of grammatical categories.
Martha Young-Scholten is a linguist specialising in the phonology and syntax of second language acquisition (SLA).
Niina Ning Zhang is a theoretical linguist specializing in Mandarin Chinese syntax and semantics.
Monica Heller is a Canadian linguistic anthropologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. She was the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2013 to 2015.
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.
Keren D. Rice is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.
Diane Lillo-Martin is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. She is currently the Director of the university's Cognitive Sciences Program as well as its Coordinator of American Sign Language Studies. She spent 12 years as Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.
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.
Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Canadian linguist. Her main area of research is the field of language variation and change.
William Delaney O'Grady is a professor in linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research focuses on syntactic theory, language acquisition, Korean and heritage language. He is also affiliated with the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa as a full member and the Island Studies Program at the University of Prince Edward Island as an adjunct professor and graduate faculty member.
In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning. Specific topics include scope, binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation, semantic macroroles, and unaccusativity.
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.