Aida Talić, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, has been recommended by the selection committee of the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) for an appointment as a Fellow in the Center during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Her appointment is pending approval from the U of I Board of Trustees at its next meeting, in January.

Talić’s project is titled “The syntax and tone of Dholuo.” Her project addresses cross-linguistic variation in the size of the nominal and adjectival domain and the interaction between syntactic structure and prosody. Specifically, she will explore several constructions in the language Dholuo from the Nilo-Saharan family, which has been mostly absent from the discussion of these issues in the previous generative literature and where syntactic structure seems to interact with tone, which has been shown to be a useful diagnostic for the presence/absence of syntactic boundaries in many tonal languages. Addressing all of the questions in this project will shed light on the universal base behind the structure of the nominal and adjectival domain, points of parametric variation in these domains, as well as contribute to building a model for the mapping from the syntactic to the prosodic structure.

Talić received a PhD in 2017 from the University of Connecticut. Her research areas include syntax, comparative syntax, phonology, syntax-prosody Interface, morphology, and psycholinguistics.