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Keynote speakers

Barbara Citko is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research focusses on minimalist syntax, syntax-semantics interface, and the syntax of Polish. Within these areas, she has worked on various types of relative clauses (free relatives, correlatives, appositives, and light headed relatives) and wh-questions (multiple wh-questions, across-the board wh-questions, wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns), coordination, and ellipsis. On a more theoretical level, she is interested in fundamental syntactic mechanisms: the structure building operation Merge, and labeling. In a number of works, she has argued that that the grammar allows multidominant structures (so-called Parallel Merge structures), in which a single element occupies two positions simultaneously. She has also explored the possibility that not all syntactic objects created by Merge need to have a label. She is the author of two books: Symmetry in Syntax: Merge, Move and Labels and Phase Theory: An Introduction, and a number of journal articles. She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

Marc L. Greenberg is a specialist in Slavic sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics, Prof. Greenberg is author of A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Language, which won the Best Book in Slavic Linguistics Award from the Association of Teachers of Slavic & East European Languages; A Short Grammar of Slovene, and numerous articles on the history and structure of Slavic languages. He co-founded and co-edited two of the first refereed platinum open-access journals in the Slavic linguistics field, Slovenski jezik / Slovene Linguistic Studies and Slavia Centralis. He has held several fellowships, including Fulbright, International Research & Exchanges Board, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Philosophical Society, and was the co-recipient of the first David Shulenburger Prize for Innovation and Advocacy in Scholarly Communication in 2014. His most recent publications are “The Slavic Area: Trajectories, Borders, Centres, and Peripheries in the Second World” in Globalising Sociolinguistics: Challenging and Expanding Theory (Routledge) and the Introduction to Brill’s A Linguistic Bibliography of Slavic 2003–2014. In 2014 he was elected to a three-year term on the Executive Board of the Association for Departments of Foreign Languages, a division of the Modern Languages Association.

Andrea Sims is Associate Professor of Slavic Linguistics at Ohio State University. A morphologist who works on Croatian, Russian, and other languages, she seeks to understand how derivational and inflectional structure emerges out of and is shaped by interactions between the representational structure of the lexicon, the cognitive processing of language, and principles of language change. In Inflectional Defectiveness, she investigates paradigmatic gaps (e.g. Russian *pobežu ‘I will conquer’) as components of inflectional systems, and how they become self-reinforcing structures, autonomous of their original motivating factors. Counter to a common perception of gaps as random exceptions, she argues that they are in fact systemic variants of normal inflectional structure. In other recent projects she has investigated different aspects of inflectional paradigmatic structure, for example, how cognitive processing of syncretism affects morphosyntactic agreement patterns in Croatian.