alice.harris

Alice C. Harris taught at Vanderbilt University for many years, for the last ten chairing the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, which housed the Linguistics Program. In 2002 she joined the faculty at SUNY Stony Brook as professor, and now serves also as Graduate Program Director. Her fieldwork is in languages of the Caucasus, and she has a strong interest in promoting documentation of endangered languages. Harris’s current research involves problems in defining the notion “word” and in the structure of paradigms. She has held major grants from NSF, NEH, and IREX. Her books include Georgian Syntax: A Study in Relational Grammar (1981), Diachronic Syntax: The Kartvelian Case (1985), Indigenous Language of the Caucasus, I: Kartvelian (editor, 1991), Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax (2002), and (with Lyle Campbell, 1995) Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, 1998 LSA Bloomfield Book Award winner. Also in 1998, she won the Earl Sutherland Research Prize at Vanderbilt University. She has served on the NSF linguistics panel and on the editorial boards of Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Typology, Diachronica, and other journals. She taught historical syntax at the 1991 Linguistics Institute, and at the 2007 Institute she taught “Languages of the Caucasus: Theoretical Challenges and New Empirical Data” with Maria Polinsky.


Research
Curriculum Vitae
Teaching

Participation in LSA


Papers in press and in preparation (under construction)

Exuberant Exponence in Tsova-Tush. Manuscript.
On the Explanation of Typologically Unusual Structures. In press.
Explaining Exuberant Agreement. In press.
Light Verbs as Classifiers in Udi. Manuscript.