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

Career

Polinsky was born in Moscow, Russia. She received a B.A. in philology from Moscow University in 1979, and an M.A. in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1986 in linguistics from the Institute for Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her dissertation examined the structure of antipassives in several ergative languages.[1][2]

She joined the University of Southern California as an Andrew Mellon Fellow in 1989, becoming an assistant professor in 1991 and an associate professor in 1995. She joined UC San Diego as an associate professor in 1997, later serving there as full professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics. In 2001 she founded the Heritage Language Program at that department. From 2006 to 2015 she was a professor and Director of the Language Science Lab at Harvard University. In 2015 she took a position as professor in the Department of Linguistics and an Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland.[3] At Maryland, she established a research field station in Guatemala

Research

Polinsky's research focuses on the relationship between syntax and information structure (syntactic encoding of topic and focus), left and right dislocation, and more recently, on syntax-prosody interface. Polinsky has been a pioneer of heritage language study and has played an active role in introducing heritage languages into modern linguistic theory.[4][5] Her research has explored the ways in which heritage speakers are different from other speakers and learners, and the consequences of these differences for our understanding of language learning. She has also been an active practitioner of experimental work on understudied languages, in the fieldwork setting.[6][7][8]

Recurrent themes in her syntactic research include long-distance dependencies, control/raising, ergativity, and scope. Polinsky is a strong advocate of a micro-typological approach to syntax, and she has done extensive primary work on Chukchi, several Austronesian languages (especially Polynesian and Malagasy), Mayan languages and languages of the Caucasus.

Honors

Polinsky has been a visiting professor at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig; Amsterdam University; the University of California, Berkeley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.[9]

She has served as associate editor of the journals Language and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and is currently on the editorial boards of the Heritage Language Journal, Linguistic Discovery,[10] and Linguistics.[11]

Since 2007 she has been the director of the annual Heritage Language Research Institute.[12]

In 2015 she was a Forum Lecturer at the Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Summer Institute.[13] In 2016 she was chosen as a member of the Linguistic Society of America's Fellows for "distinguished contributions to the discipline".[14]

She is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[15]

Selected publications

  • S. Montrul and M. Polinsky (eds.) 2022. "The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics".
  • M. Polinsky (ed.) 2021. "The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus".
  • M. Polinsky. 2018. "Heritage Languages and Their Speakers". Cambridge Studies in Linguistics.
  • M. Polinsky. 2016. "Deconstructing Ergativity: Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features," Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax.
  • M. Polinsky and O. Kagan. 2007. “Heritage languages: In the 'wild' and in the classroom,” Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 368–395.
  • M. Polinsky. 2006. “Incomplete acquisition: American Russian,” Journal of Slavic Linguistics.
  • M. Polinsky, E. Potsdam. 2002. “Backward control,” Linguistic Inquiry.
  • M. Polinsky, E. Potsdam. 2001. “Long-distance agreement and topic in Tsez,” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory.
  • B. Comrie, G. Stone and M. Polinsky. 1996. The Russian language in the twentieth century. Oxford University Press.[16][17][18]
  • M. Polinsky. 1995. American Russian: Language loss meets language acquisition, in Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics.
  • B. Comrie and M. Polinsky, (eds.) 1993. Causatives and transitivity. John Benjamins.

References

  1. ↑ Polinskaja, Maria S. (1986) Diffuznye glagoly v sintaksise ergativnyx jazykov. Ph.D. dissertation.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang, U. Dressler, Dieter Kastovsky, Oskar E. Pfeiffer, Franz Rainer (eds.) (2005). Morphology and its demarcations: Selected papers from the 11th Morphology meeting, Vienna, February 2004. John Benjamins. pp. 263. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ↑ "Maria Polinsky to join UMD". Language at Maryland. October 21, 2014. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
  4. ↑ "Maria Polinsky". Harvard University Dept. of Linguistics. Archived from the original on July 22, 2015. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
  5. ↑ Benmamoun, E, Montrul S and Polinsky M. (2013). "Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics" (PDF). Theoretical Linguistics. 39 (3–4). doi:10.1515/tl-2013-0009. S2CID 54541144.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ↑ Clemens, LE, Coon J, Mateo Pedro P, Morgan AM, Polinsky M, Tandet G, Wagers M. (2015). "Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: A view from Mayan". Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Retrieved September 6, 2015.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ Polinsky, Polinsky M, Gomez-Gallo C, Graff P, Kravtchenko E. (2012). "Subject Preference and Ergativity". Lingua. 122 (3): 267–277. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.11.004. S2CID 15351481. Retrieved September 6, 2015.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ↑ Longenbaugh, N, Polinsky M (2015). "The processing of long-distance dependencies in Niuean". Proceedings of AFLA. Retrieved September 6, 2015.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  9. ↑ Office, Harvard News. "Harvard Gazette: Polinsky named professor of linguistics". news.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2015-09-20.
  10. ↑ "Editorial Board". Linguistic Discovery--Dartmouth College. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  11. ↑ Bradt, Steve (June 8, 2006). "Polinsky named professor of linguistics". Harvard University Gazette. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
  12. ↑ "Maria Polinsky". NHLRC: Conference on Heritage/Community Languages. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
  13. ↑ "Home | The Linguistic Summer Institute 2015". University of Chicago. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
  14. ↑ "Announcing the LSA Fellows Class of 2016 | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2015-09-20.
  15. ↑ "Utenlandske medlemmer" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Retrieved 4 July 2021.
  16. ↑ Nitschke, Claudia (May 1999). "Review of "The Russian language in the twentieth century."". Russian Linguistics (in Russian). 23 (2): 257–263. doi:10.1023/A:1006893305650. JSTOR 40160589. S2CID 169606541.
  17. ↑ Kresin, Susan C. (Winter 1996). "Review of "The Russian language in the twentieth century."". The Slavic and East European Journal. 40 (4): 784–786. doi:10.2307/310134. JSTOR 310134.
  18. ↑ Offord, Derek (October 2000). "Review of "The Russian language in the twentieth century."". The Modern Language Review. 95: 1146. doi:10.2307/3736701. JSTOR 3736701.
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