Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
Research & Practice Areas
Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Prosody/Information Structure Interface, Evidentials and Temporality, Language contact and Language acquisition
Biography
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. As of 2020, she is a Emeritus Professor of Linguistics. Her research focus is in theoretical linguistics (syntax and lexicon, syntax and prosody, syntax and semantics), language contact and language acquisition.
Education
- Ph.D. Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9/1982
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- Post-doctoral fellow, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, Université Paris 5/CNRS, Paris, France, 09/01/1983-07/30/1985
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
Professor Zubizarreta is interested in linguistic theory as a model of human’s linguistic competence. This research program investigates the abstract principles that underlie human languages and the space of possible language variation. This is achieved by in-depth comparative investigation of the grammar of different languages. Her research includes in-depth study of: (1) the lexicon-syntax interface in Romance, Germanic, and Korean (2) the interface of prosody, word order, and information structure in Romance and Germanic, and more recently in Paraguayan Guarani (3) Evidentials and temporality in languages with no tense, with Paraguayan Guarani as a case study. She has constructed an annotated corpus of Paraguayan Guarani, which includes adult as well as children’s narratives, collected in rural schools in Paraguay: https://guaranicorpus.usc.edu. The work on Paraguayan Guarani was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Publications: See attached for a full listing. For recent publications on Paraguayan Guarani, please visit the Publication Page in the Guarani corpus website: https://guaranicorpus.usc.edu
Research Keywords
Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Prosody/Information Structure Interface, Evidentials and Temporality, Language contact and Language acquisition