Misha Becker Assistant Professor Linguistics Department University of North Carolina 324 Dey Hall, CB#3155 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155 919-962-5009 email: construct by combining my first initial and my last name at email.unc.edu

Research Interests

My background is in syntactic theory and the acquisition/development of syntax in children (first language). I'm also interested in a broad range of issues in cognitive science including visual cognition, spatial representations, language processing and learnability theory. My dissertation is on the development of the copula (be) in English (available through the IRCS Technical Reports series; tech report #00-05 under 2000 tech reports). A text version of the abstract is available here. (If the link to IRCS does not work, please send me an e-mail.)

My current research is about how children learn raising verbs (e.g. seem or appear), and how children distinguish raising verbs from control verbs (e.g. want or try).

Courses

Click here for information about my current and past courses at UNC.

CV

Click here for my CV (pdf)

Selected Recent Papers

• 2007: "Animacy, Expletives, and the Learning of the Raising-Control Distinction", Proceedings of GALANA 2.
• 2006: "There Began to be a Learnability Puzzle", Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 37:3, pp. 441-456.
• 2005: "Copula Omission is a Grammatical Reflex", Language Acquisition, vol. 12:2, pp. 157-167.
• 2005: "Learning Verbs Without Arguments: The Case of Raising Verbs", Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 34:2, p. 165-191.
• 2004: "Learning Verbs that Lack Argument Structure: The Case of Raising Verbs," in Proceedings of GALA 2003, edited by Jacqueline van Kampen and Sergio Baauw. (Word)
• 2002: "Seem, and Other Hazards of the Lexicon", in Proceedings of CLS38 (ed. by M. Andronis, E. Debenport, A. Pycha & K. Yoshimura, pp. 79-90). (Word)
• 2002: "Is Isn't Be", presented at the Workshop on Microvariation in the Syntax of Auxiliaries in Leuven, August 2001 (in Lingua, vol. 114)). (pdf)
• 2002: "The Development of the Copula in Child English: The Lightness of Be" in Annual Review of Language Acquisition, vol. 2.