2008-2009 Visiting Assistant Professors
Marco Nicolis, Visiting Assistant Professor from Spring 2008-Spring 2009 Dr. Nicolis is teaching Ling 527: Generative Syntax I and Ling 529: Generative Syntax III in the Fall 2008 semester. Last Spring Dr. Nicolis taught undergraduate Syntax and graduate Syntax II.
Patrick Rebuschat conducted his doctoral research at the Research Centre for English & Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge. His PhD investigated the implicit learning of natural language syntax, i.e. how humans come to acquire syntactic knowledge incidentally and without awareness of the information they have acquired. In addition to his interest in implicit learning processes, Patrick has also been conducting research on the cognitive basis of language and music. In 2007, he co-organized an international conference on "Language and Music as Cognitive Systems", which focused on the cognitive, neural and evolutionary aspects of language and music, and he is currently editing - together with Martin Rohrmeier, John Hawkins and Ian Cross - a selection of the talks for publication with Oxford University Press. His other research interests include Artificial Grammar Learning, the role of grammatical complexity in learning, and connectionist modelling of language acquisition.
Matthew Wolf recently finished the Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His research focuses on the interface between phonology (the pronunciation of words) and morphology (the formation of words from roots and affixes). Within this area, he has worked on several topics including phonologically-conditioned allomorph selection and paradigm gaps, morpheme realization, cyclic/base-identity effects, and non-derived environment blocking.
This year he is teaching the graduate Phonology & Phonetics I-II sequence (510 & 511), in addition to undergraduate Phonology (214, in the fall) and Phonetics (213, in the spring). In the spring semester he will also teach a phonology seminar on the theme of Lexical Phonology, Stratal OT, and related theories.
