Professors

Aria Adli

Professor of Linguistics (UoC)

Aria Adli specializes on grammatical variation. He tries to explain why certain grammatical forms (such as word order or pronouns) are preferred or used more frequently than others by speakers. He does so by taking into account language-internal as well as language-external factors. With regard to language-internal factors, he works on the syntax of a sentence in its speech context and on information structure. With regard to language-external factors, his research focuses on the role of social stratification, lifestyle according to Bourdieu, and register. His approach builds on language comparison (with emphasis on French, Spanish, Catalan, and Persian) and on cross-cultural analysis. His empirical methods include field work, corpus analysis, acceptability judgments, statistics, and computer simulations.

Gregory Guy

Professor of Linguistics (NYU)

Gregory Guy specializes in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology. In sociolinguistics he has worked extensively on language variation and change, with emphasis on variation and linguistic theory, social aspects of variation and change and the social and linguistic distribution of language change in progress, and quantitative research methodology (the statistical modelling of variability). His current research focuses on the representation of language variation in linguistic theory. Other interests include phonological and syntactic variables in English, Portuguese and Spanish, historical linguistics, Romance linguistics (his areas of language specialization include English, Portuguese and Spanish), phonological theory, pidgin and creole studies, phonetics, and sociolinguistic universals.