Maria Polinsky University of Maryland

Maria Polinsky is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the intersection of theoretical syntax and the study of cross-linguistic variation in sentence structure. Language-wise, she specializes in Austronesian and languages of the Caucasus. These days she divides her time between theoretical and experimental work on long-distance dependencies, ergativity, and subject island effects. She has also studied language universals and their explanation, the expression of information structure in natural language and incomplete acquisition (heritage language).