Diane Massam facts for kids

Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.

Education and research

She earned her PhD in linguistics under Noam Chomsky in 1985 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She held a position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto from 1989 until her retirement in 2017, when she became professor emeritus.

Massam specializes in the syntax of Niuean, an Austronesian language spoken in the South Pacific country of Niue. She developed an analysis of a type of verb plus noun compounding called noun incorporation which has opened a window to analyze similar phenomena in other languages. Her analysis also proposed a novel way of understanding the relationship between a subject and its predicate.

Honors

She was a keynote speaker at the 21st annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) in 2014.

She has served on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, and on the Editorial Board of the journal Linguistic Inquiry.

Massam was appointed Vice-President of the Canadian Linguistic Association in 2015. Upon completion of her two-year term in this position she served as President of the CLA from 2017 to 2019.

See also

In Spanish: Diane Massam para niños