Marlyse Baptista Named President’s Distinguished Professor of Linguistics

Marlyse Baptista has been named President’s Distinguished Professor of Linguistics. Baptista is a contact linguist and researches the morphology (the form of words and phrases), syntax (the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence), and development of a wide range of languages. She specializes in Pidgin and Creole languages and their source languages, and in theories of language emergence, contact, and change. She has a particular interest in cognition and theoretical models of language contact and language emergence. With collaborators, Baptista uses experimental methods involving artificial language learning to investigate how languages and their speakers converge, diverge, and innovate in multilingual settings. She also uses fieldwork data and tools from generative syntax to study the grammatical properties of Pidgins and Creoles. Baptista’s current research investigates the cognitive processes involved in contact situations and focuses on the role of convergence in second language acquisition, bilingualism, and Creole genesis and development. She directs the Language Contact and Cognition Lab in the Department of Linguistics and is a faculty member in MindCORE.