Formal approaches to complexity in heritage language grammars

Maria Polinsky is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park and Director of the National Heritage Research Center at UCLA. She is the founder and Director of several research field stations. Polinsky’s research combines theoretical syntactic work with in-depth investigation of understudied languages. She also has an active research program in heritage languages. She edited several handbooks including the Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics (2021), and she is the author of over a hundred scholarly articles and several books including Deconstructing Ergativity (2016) and Heritage Languages and Their Speakers (2018).

Michael T. Putnam is Professor of German & Linguistics at Penn State University and Visiting Professor of Linguistics at the University of Greenwich. Putnam’s research focuses on the structure of Germanic languages past and present, from both formal and experimental perspectives. He has a particular interest in the diasporic varieties of Germanic languages and issues related to bi/multilingualism more generally. He has edited several volumes and books, including the Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics (2020) (with B. Richard Page), and has authored dozens of other scholarly articles and books, such as The Structural Design of Language (2013) (with Thomas S. Stroik) and Unbounded Dependency Constructions: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives (2021) (with Rui P. Chaves).