The Ohio State University Congress on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (OSUCHiLL)

Invited Speakers

Marlyse Baptista

Marlyse Baptista is the current Vice-President, President Elect for the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and CAAS at the University of Michigan. She studies the morpho-syntax interface in pidgin and creole languages, combining corpus data with the use of theoretical, descriptive an d technological tools. Her research explores the ways creole languages inform linguistic theory and to what extent linguistic theory, in turn, helps understand how creole grammatical systems operate. She also examines theories of language change, language creation and creole formation; she has recently focused on the precise identification of the cognitive processes involved in contact situations. The applied side to her work considers literacy issues and orthographic choices confronting the representation of creoles in Education, as in the case of Cape Verdean Creole.

Brian Joseph

Brian Joseph (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1978) is currently Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and the Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics at Ohio State University, where he has taught since 1979, serving as department chair 1987-97. His primary specialization is in historical linguistics, especially pertaining to Greek, the Balkan languages, and Indo-European. He is author or co-author of 5 books and over 200 articles, and has been the editor or co-editor of 20 volumes, including the 2003 Handbook of Historical Linguistics (Blackwell Publishers). He has been heavily involved in journal editing, having served as the editor of Language (Journal of the Linguistic Society of America) from 2002-2008, and of Diachronica from 1999-2001. At present he is co-editor of the Journal of Greek Linguistics, and associate editor of Diachronica. His current research projects include a co-authored book (with Victor Friedman of the University of Chicago) on the Balkan languages, to be published by Cambridge University Press, a book-length critique of grammaticalization, and a collection of studies on Albanian linguistics.