Faculty

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Maîtrise de Linguistique Générale from L’Université de Paris 8 in 1978, and her PhD in Linguistics from M.I.T. in 1982. From 1983-85, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale at L’Université Paris 5/CNRS (France). In 1985-86, she was a Visiting Professor at Tilburg University (The Netherlands). In 1987-88, she was an Assistant Professor at the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at University of Maryland, College Park, MD. In 1988, she joined the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) as an Associate Professor and in 1998, she was promoted to Full Professor.

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Email: zubizarr@usc.edu

Bill Rutherford

William Rutherford's long career as a linguist and language professional represents a development of research interests starting with second-language pedagogy in the 1960s and early 1970s, moving in the 70s and 80s to theoretical and empirical work in the then-new field of second language acquisition, and settling in the 90s on the contribution to SLA of findings from a variety of other fields. His main interests currently represent, therefore, an intersection of research in language acquisition, in grammatical theory, and in psycholinguistic theories of language learnability, especially to the extent that findings in any of these disciplines can serve to shed light on developments in another. For ten years (1987-97) Prof. Rutherford was co-general editor of the monograph series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders and in 1995 he was the recipient of a festschrift, The Current State of Interlanguage: Studies in Honor of William E. Rutherford (Amsterdam: Benjamins). He is presently engaged in the development of an extensive computerized data-base of L2 learner language coded for linguistic features of syntax, morphology, and lexicon and designed to serve L2 acquisition researchers.

Selected publications:

• (editor) Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition (1984). Amsterdam: Benjamin.
• Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching (1987). London: Longman.
  Preemption and the Learning of L2 Grammars (1989). Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11/4.
• SLA: Universal Grammar and Language Learnability (1994). In Ellis (ed.), Implicit and Explicit Learning of Languages. New York: Academic Press.

Email: rutherfo@usc.edu

Elsi Kaiser

Elsi Kaiser is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Her research is in the area of sentence processing, with a focus on the syntax/pragmatics/semantics interface.

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Email: emkaiser@usc.edu

Associated Faculty

Tania Ionin

View her website at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign