Lynn Nichols
Assistant Professor

The Lexicon & Syntax, Lexical Semantics, Southwestern Pueblo Languages, Korean, Hindi, Burmese

Groups: Syntax & Semantics, Fieldwork & Language Documentation

Contact information

Email: nich@berkeley.edu

Office hours: On Sabbatical Fall 2008, Office Hours By Appointment

Web site: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~lnich/

Personal statement

Ph.D., Linguistics, Harvard University, 1998. Assistant Professor Harvard University, 1997-2002. Funded by a 2006 grant from the Hellman Family Fund and a 2000-2002 grant from Harvard's Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative, her research concerns the nature and structure of lexical semantic information and the influence of lexical semantics on syntax. This work currently investigates a correlation between morphosyntactic type and semantic patterns in the verb lexicon. Other interests include lexical effects on the syntax and semantics of anaphora. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on Zuni (Southwestern US), as well as South Asian, Southeast Asian and East Asian languages. In addition to a grammar of Zuni, she is involved in two documentation projects on Northern Tiwa: a database of Taos texts and the compilation of a dictionary and grammar of Picuris; toward promoting research in linguistics in undergraduate education, the two latter projects include the substantial involvement of undergraduates through both coursework and the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. She founded Berkeley's Field Data Group, a working lab group dedicated to students' in-progress data from recent and ongoing fieldwork for the development of research and preparation for return to the field. She is a member of the Linguistic Society of America's Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation for 2006-2009 and a faculty affiliate of UC Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asia Studies.

Selected publications

Lexical Semantic Constraints on Noun Roots and Noun Borrowability. 2008 Studies in Language 32: 683-700.

Zuni Accusative Intransitives. 2008 International Journal of American Linguistics 74: 115-140.

Methodology and the Empirical Base of Typology. 2007 Linguistic Typology 11.1: 259-264.

Counterfactuality in Burmese, In Mufwene, Wheeler and Francis (eds.), Polymorphous Linguistics: The Legacy of Jim McCawley. pp. 283-294. MIT Press (2005).

How Much Syntax is Syntax? In J. Thompson & S. Armoskaite (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas, Interfaces with Discourse. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics. 2005

Zuni. In Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2 vols., ed. Philipp Strazny. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.

Attitude Evaluation in Complex NPs, In A. Carnie & H. Harley (eds.) Formal Approaches to Functional Forces in Grammar, pp. 155-164. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003.

Reference to Contexts in Zuni Temporal and Modal Domains, Proceedings of SULA 2 (Semantics of Underrepresented Languages in the Americas), GSLA, UMass Amherst, 2003.

The Syntactic Basis of Referential Hierarchy Phenomena: Clues from Languages with and without Morphological Case. Lingua 111: 515-537, 2001.