Alice Harris

Professor Emerita

Emeritus
alice harris
Contact
Email
Email
Personal Website
Location
ILC N431H

Having received a B.A. from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, an M.A. from the University of Essex (England), and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976, Alice Carmichael Harris held positions at Vanderbilt University and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook before coming to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2009. 

Harris’s 1995 book, Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, (with Lyle Campbell) won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 1998, and in the same year she won The Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research, Vanderbilt University.  Other awards include the Erskine Fellowship, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1999; a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo, 2004-05; Outstanding Alumna Award (Randolph-Macon Woman’s College), 2004, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, 2009-2010.  In 2011 she held the Collitz Professorship for the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics Institute at the University of Colorado.  She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2016. In 2020 she was named Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

RESEARCH AREAS

  • historical linguistics
  • morphology
  • languages of the Caucasus
  • psycholinguistics of understudied languages

PUBLICATIONS

Books Authored

  • Georgian Syntax, Cambridge University Press, 1981, reprinted 2009
  • Diachronic Syntax:  The Kartvelian Case (Syntax and Semantics, 18), Academic Press, 1985
  • Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Alice C. Harris and Lyle Campbell, Cambridge University Press, 1995
  • Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax, Oxford University Press, 2002
  • Multiple Exponence, Oxford University Press, 2017

Edited Work

  • The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus: Kartvelian, ed. by Alice C. Harris, 1991
  • Laboratory in the Field: Advances in Cross-Linguistic Psycholinguistics, a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, ed. by Alice C. Harris, Florian Jaeger, and Elisabeth Norcliffe.  Volume 30, Number 9, November 2015.

Selected Articles

  • Georgian and the Unaccusative Hypothesis, Language 58: 290-306. 1982.
  • Review article: R.M.W. Dixon, Ergativity, in Language 73: 359-374.  1997.
  • Where in the Word is the Udi Clitic?  Language 76: 593-616.  2000.
  • Revisiting Anaphoric Islands.  Language 82: 114-130.  2006.
  • Trapped Morphology.  (Alice C. Harris and Jan Terje Faarlund.)  Journal of Linguistics 42: 289-315.  2006.
  • Light Verbs as Classifiers in Udi.  Diachronica 25, guest editor, Claire Bowern, 213-241.  2008.
  • Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 27:267-303.  2009.
  • Perception of Exuberant Exponence in Batsbi: Functional or Incidental?  Alice C. Harris and Arthur G. Samuel.  Language 87: 447-469.  2011.
  • Processing and Production of Affixes in Georgian and English: Testing a Processing Account of the Suffixing Preference. Alice C. Harris and Arthur G. Samuel. The Journal of Linguistics, vol. 61 2025. Online in FirstView,2024.
  • Processing and Production of Clitics in Udi and European Portuguese: Testing a Processing Account of an Extension of the Suffixing Preference. Alice C. Harris and Arthur G. Samuel. The Journal of Linguistics, vol. 61 2025.. Online in FirstView, 2024.