Rajesh Bhatt

Rajesh Bhatt is Professor of Linguistics, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is interested in the comparative syntax of the Modern Indo-Aryan languages, the syntax-semantics interface, Tree Adjoining Grammars, and creation of linguistic resources for South Asian Languages. He completed his BTech in Computer Science at IIT Kanpur in 1993 and got his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. From 1999-2004 he was an assistant professor at UT Austin. Since 2004, he has been at UMass Amherst where he is currently a full professor. He has also taught as a visiting professor at MIT and at various iterations of the LSA summer institutes, LISSIM summer school in India, the NYI in Saint Petersburg Russia, and the CreteLing summer school.

Željko Bošković

Željko Bošković is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include syntactic theory, generative typology, the syntax-semantics interface, and the syntax-phonology interface. He has been teaching at the University of Connecticut since 1995, when he obtained his PhD degree. He has also overseen over 50 PhD dissertations and published over 130 research articles. 

jessica coon

Jessica Coon is Professor of Linguistics at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages.  Her research is in syntactic theory, with a special focus on cross-linguistic variation and topics in the syntax of under-documented languages of the Americas, especially languages of the Mayan family, and more recently Kanien’kéha (Northern Iroquoian). She has worked on topics including ergativity, split ergativity, hierarchy effects, verb-initial word order, nominalization, and agreement. In addition to theoretical work, she has been involved in collaborative partnerships with language communities aimed at language documentation and revitalization.

KATHRYN DAVIDSON

Kathryn Davidson is a Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University, where she directs the Meaning & Modality lab. Her research interests include experimental and theoretical semantics, pragmatics, and connections between semantics and other aspects of cognitive science. She frequently approaches these topics from the perspective of language development and from language as it occurs in the visual modality, both full sign languages like American Sign Language as well as the visual/gestural aspects of spoken languages.

Caroline Féry

Caroline Féry is emerita Professor for Phonology at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Frankfurt where she worked between 2010 and 2019. Before that she was Professor for “Theory of Grammar/Phonology” at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam since 1999. Her interests lie in the prosodic and tonal structure of languages, most of all at the interface between syntax and intonation as well as in the theory of grammar. She founded the Research Center on Information Structure in Potsdam and Berlin, and the Graduate School on Nominal Modification in Frankfurt. She has written and edited several books, the most recent one is an overview of the phonology of German in an Optimality Theory framework. Brussels is her native town, and French her native language.

Elly van Gelderen

Elly van Gelderen is Regents Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University. She is a syntactician interested in systematic language change, in particular grammaticalization and the linguistic cycle. She argues that such systematic change provides insight in the Faculty of Language. Elly has also examined argument structure in the history of English: the internal aspect of a verb stays remarkably constant. Her most recent book projects are Third Factors in Language Variation and Change (CUP, 2022) and The Linguistic Cycle: Economy and Renewal in Historical Linguistics (Routledge, 2023).

MAGDALENA KAUFMANN

to be updated

SOTARO KITA

Sotaro Kita is Professor of Psychology of Language at the University of Warwick. After a PhD in psychology and linguistics from University of Chicago, he worked at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, University of Bristol, and University of Birmingham.  His main research area is the relationship between gesture, language and cognition. He has investigated how processing of gesture and processing speech are inter-related, how gesture production influences thinking, how gesture varies cross-culturally, how gesture contributes to language development.  He has used various methodologies to investigate the relationship such as behavioural and neuroscientific experiments and qualitatively analysis of data collected in field work. 

JEREMY KUHN

Jeremy Kuhn is a CNRS researcher, affiliated with the Institut Jean Nicod at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He studies natural language semantics, with a particular focus on sign language data (including French Sign Language and American Sign Language). He is broadly interested in semantic phenomena that pose challenges for compositionality, including plural dependencies and negative concord. An important theme of his work on sign language revolves around the integration of iconicity—in which structure is preserved between form and meaning–and the combinatorial grammar. He has investigated how combinatorial and iconic mechanisms work in tandem throughout semantic composition to generate and manipulate discourse representations.

ALESSANDRO LENCI

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elin mccready

Elin McCready is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. Her research is on semantics and pragmatics, with focus on expressive content, social meaning, and evidentiality. She is the author of Reliablity in Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Semantics and Pragmatics of Honorification: Register and Social Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the forthcoming Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles (with Robert Henderson; Oxford University Press), as well as articles in journals including Linguistics and Philosophy, Semantics & Pragmatics and other journals. She also does work in literature and literary interpretation, and is a member of the art collective MOM. 

ANDREW MURPHY

Andrew Murphy obtained his PhD in 2017 from Leipzig University. He has since worked at the University of Chicago, the University of Göttingen and the University of Potsdam. His research interests pertain to theoretical morpho-syntax and he has worked on a range of phenomena such
as movement, agreement, ellipsis and inflectional morphology from a variety of languages. He has published his research in journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Inquiry, Glossa and The Linguistic Review.

roland pfau

Roland Pfau is Associate Professor in Sign Language Linguistics at the Department of General Linguistics of the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his MA (1995) and PhD (2001) from the University of Frankfurt. His research focuses on aspects of sign language morphosyntax, syntax, and grammaticalization, often taking a typological and cross-modal perspective on the subject matter by comparing, on the one hand, sign languages to spoken languages and, on the other hand, sign languages to each other. He has (co-)authored numerous journal articles and book chapters, and he is co-editor of the journal Sign Language & Linguistics.

BENJAMIN SPECTOR

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THOMAS EDE ZIMMERMANN

Thomas Ede Zimmermann received a doctoral degree in theoretical linguistics from Konstanz University in 1987 and held teaching positions at various universities before being appointed professor of formal semantics at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1999, from where he recently retired. His main research interests include descriptive compositional semantics, the logical foundations of semantics, and philosophy of language. He (co-) authored two textbooks as well as more than 50 research papers.