Faculty Directory

Maria Polinsky received her doctorate in Linguistics in 1986. She has taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University. She specializes in linguistic theory and has done extensive work on endangered languages in different locations around the world.

• Language universals and their explanation
• Comparative syntactic theory
• Expression of information structure in natural language
• Incomplete acquisition (heritage languages)
• Austronesian languages (esp. Malagasy, Maori)
• Languages of the Caucasus (esp. Tsez, Kabardian)