Linguistics Emeriti

Lyn Frazier taught courses in psycholinguistics.  Her research focuses on questions of how adults comprehend language --in particular how they assign a syntactic structure, and navigate the interface between syntax and interpretation. 

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. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2016.

Angelika Kratzer’s area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. Her research concerns how natural languages are constructed so as to make it possible for humans to assemble complex meanings systematically from small and simple pieces.

John McCarthy is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus and Provost Emeritus. His research focuses on phonology, Optimality Theory, and the Semitic languages.

Barbara Partee’s research and teaching interests center on formal semantics and its connections with syntax, pragmatics, and logic, and on related issues in the philosophy of language and in cognitive science.

Tom Roeper specializes in language acquisition, syntax and morphology.

Lisa Selkirk specializes in phonology, prosody, and the Interfaces of phonology with syntax and semantics

Margaret (Peggy) Speas received her M.A. from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. from MIT.  In her research on the syntax of natural language, she has focused on the role of functional categories and the basic principles that constrain syntactic structure across languages.

Woolford’s specialization is syntax. Although she has published on various topics in syntax including Wh Movement, passives, and object shift, the focus of her current research is case and agreement theory and typology.