photo: Chris Carmichael

Misha Becker Associate Professor Linguistics Department University of North Carolina 301 Smith Building, CB#3155 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155 919-962-1192 (Linguistics office) 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 "displacing" predicates. These are verbs and adjectives that do not select an external argument (subject) and thus allow another NP to be "displaced" into the subject position. Displacing predicates include raising verbs (e.g. seem or appear), tough adjectives (easy), unaccusative verbs (arrive) and passives. My main question is how children distinguish these predicates from control verbs (want or claim), control adjectives (eager), unergative verbs (laugh) and actives. These are predicates that do select an external argument but occur in superficially similar sentence environments (e.g. John seems/claims to like pizza). The answer I am currently pursuing is that NP animacy provides a crucial cue: encountering a predicate with an inanimate subject should tell learners that the predicate is a displacing predicate. I am currently working on a book about how NP (in)animacy helps children acquire displacing predicates. In addition, I have on-going collaborative 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, and other pairs of displacing and non-displacing predicates;
• Bruno Estigarribia (Romance Languages, UNC) on experiments with adults and children to discover how sentential factors (e.g. subject animacy) influence individual's inferences about novel raising/control verbs and tough/control adjectives;
• Masako Hirotani (School of Linguistics and Language Studies and Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University) on ERP studies of children's grammaticality judgments

Courses

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

CV

Click here for my CV (pdf)

Selected Recent Papers

• 2012 (with Bruno Estigarribia and Duna Gylfadottir): "Tough-Adjectives are Easy to Learn" in Supplemental Proceedings of BUCLD 36. (link)
• 2011 (with W. Garrett Mitchener): "A Computational Model of Learning the Raising-Control Distinction" in Research on Language and Computation, vol. 8, pp. 169-207. (pdf)
• 2011 (with Bruno Estigarribia): "Drawing Inferences about Novel Raising and Control Verbs" in Proceedings of GALANA 4, Cascadilla Proceedings Project. (pdf)
• 2009: "The Role of NP Animacy and Expletives in Verb Learning," Language Acquisition, vol. 16, pp. 283-296. preprint version
• 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.