Aida Talić, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, has been appointed a CAS (Center for Advanced Study) Beckman Fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.

CAS Beckman Fellows are untenured University of Illinois faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. With the Professors and Associates, they form the core of the Center for Advanced Study community. Fellows also participate in a yearly roundtable discussion of research interests and are invited to offer a future CAS presentation.

Professor 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.