Magda Oiry
Senior Lecturer & Undergraduate Advisor, Director of Linguistics Certificate Programs
Magda Oiry received a PhD from the University of Nantes, in France in 2008.
Her dissertation explores the interrogative strategies 3- to 6-year-olds French native speakers adopt when two verbs are involved (What do you think Mary bought?). She published her dissertation in 2011, at the Editions Universitaires Européennes. Her research is bidirectional: language acquisition and/or syntax.
Magda Oiry has been teaching at UMass since 2008, her successive lecturer positions gave her the opportunity to teach in the French unit at LLC and in the Linguistics department. She is maintaining her interests in the grammar of French as well as the link between linguistics and literature. She is the Romance Liaison for Second Language Acquisition, developing a strong community across departments with the help of Luiz Amaral, Meghan Armstrong, Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper. In the Linguistics department, she teaches syntax, first and second language acquisition courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.
RESEARCH AREAS
- First and Second Language Acquisition
- French Syntax
- Acquisition of Factivity
- Prosody of wh-in situ in Long Distance questions
- Embedded clefts in French
- Each/Every Acquisition
PUBLICATIONS
“Evidence from L1 Acquisition for the Syntax of Wh- Scope Marking in French” (with Hamida Demirdache), 2006.
“How Language Acquisition Reveals Minimalist Symmetry in the Wh-System” (with Tom Roeper), 2009.
“A case of true optionality: Wh-in-situ patterns like Long Movement in French”, Linguistic Analysis, 2011.