Asia Pietraszko

Asia Pietraszko

she/her/hers

Associate Professor of Linguistics

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Director of Syntax Lab

PhD, The University of Chicago

Office Location
510 Lattimore Hall
Web Address
Website

Office Hours: By appointment

Biography

Professor Pietraszko works in syntax and morphology, with main focus on verbal morphosyntax in Bantu languages. She's interested in clausal architecture and processes underlying structure building, such as selection, displacement and agreement. Her dissertation was a study of verbal periphrasis and inflectional dependencies in multi-verb constructions in Zimbabwean Ndebele. Other topics she's worked on include clause nominalization, head-movement, do-support, complementation, backward control, relative clauses and the syntax-phonology interface.

Research Overview

Prof. Asia Pietraszko works in syntax and morphology, with main focus on verbal morphosyntax in Bantu languages. Her research contributes to developing a theory of clausal architecture and processes underlying structure building, such as selection, movement and agreement. She is the Director of the Field Syntax Lab.

Current Grants

National Science Foundation research grant (BCS 2214933): "The typology of subordinate clauses: A case study"

The main ongoing project investigating the patterns of complement selection by clause-embedding verbs. It aims to assess the role of c-selection and s-selection in complementation. We focus on dialects of Zulu and Northern Ndebele to gain insights from microvariation. ($439,222.00, Co-PI: Aaron White)

Research Interests

  • Syntax and Morphology
  • Clausal Architecture
  • Bantu Morphosyntax
  • Selection and Complementation
  • Syntactic Movement and Locality

Courses Offered (subject to change)

  • LING 220/420:  Intro to Syntax
  • LING 260(W)/460:  Syntactic Theory I
  • LING 389:  Senior Seminar
  • LING 520:  Syntactic Theory II
  • LING 560:  Seminar in Syntax
  • LING 589:  Field Methods in Linguistics

Selected Publications