About

Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
Professor of Linguistics

Contact Information
Office: GFS 301Q
Phone: (213) 740-3887
E-mail: zubizarr@usc.edu

LINKS
Curriculum Vitae
www-rcf
 

Biographical Sketch
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. Her research focus is in theoretical linguistics (syntax and lexicon, syntax and prosody, syntax and semantics), as well as in second language acquisition.
 

Education
Ph.D. Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9/1982
 

Description of Research

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 set of parameters that account for linguistic variations. This is achieved by in-depth comparative investigation of the grammar of different languages. Part of her research focuses on the lexicon and its relationship to syntax. Another part of her research has dealt with the semantics and syntax of determiners and their role in a theory of denotation. A fine-grained study of inalienable constructions in English and French reveals that a minimal difference in the denotation of the definite determiner has important consequences for the expression of part-whole relations and for the construal of certain generic expressions. More recently, she has investigated the relation between prosody and focus in Germanic and Romance, and the manner in which the prosody/focus relation affects word order in the Romance languages. The results obtained have far-reaching consequences with respect to central theoretical issues, such as the general architecture of the grammar.
 

Publications

Book
(eds) Freidin, R., Otero, C., Zubizarreta, M. (2008). Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zubizarreta, M. L., Oh, E. |. (2007). On the Syntactic Composition of Manner and Motion. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Zubizarreta, M. L. (1998). Prosody, Focus, and Word Order, MIT Press, 1998.
 

Service to the Profession

Editorships and Editorial Boards
Member of the Associate Editorial Board (1988-present), PROBUS (International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics), 1988-  
co-editor (with Violeta Demonte), PROBUS, Special Issue, 2010 (On the lexicon-syntax interface in Romance languages)., 2009-2010   
Co-editor (with Tania Ionin), Second Language Research, Special Issue, 26.3. 2010 (L1 Influence and retreat from Negative Transfer), 2009-2010   
Member of the Associate Editorial Board (1986-present), Linguistic Inquiry, 1986-2009  
 

Professional Memberships
Linguistic Society of America, 2006-  
 
 
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