Misha Becker Associate Professor Linguistics Department University of North Carolina 301 Smith Building, CB#3155 (NOTE: new address (as of 8/25/08)) 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). I am currently collaborating with others on three projects:

• with W. Garrett Mitchener (Mathematics, College of Charleston) on developing a computational learning algorithm to model how children acquire the distinction between raising and control verbs;
• with Bruno Estigarribia (UNC Psychology) on an experiment with adults and children to discover how sentential factors (e.g. subject animacy) influence individual's inferences about novel raising/control verbs;
• with Katya Pertsova (UNC Linguistics) on an artificial language study of how different morphological paradigms are learned.

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. (pdf)
• 2005: "Learning Verbs Without Arguments: The Case of Raising Verbs", Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 34:2, p. 165-191. (pdf)
• 2004: "Copula Omission is a Grammatical Reflex", Language Acquisition, vol. 12:2, pp. 157-167. (pdf)
• 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.