About
Marlyse Baptista, Professor of Linguistics, studies the morphosyntactic interface in pidgin and creole languages, combining corpus data with the use of theoretical, descriptive, and experimental methodologies.
Her book Noun Phrases in Creole Languages, co-edited with Jacqueline Guéron (2007), investigates the syntax and semantics of noun phrases in 15 creoles while highlighting the interpretive variation and complexity of bare nouns. She also examines theories of language creation and creole formation; she focuses on the precise identification of the cognitive processes involved in contact situations, including grammaticalization, restructuring, and convergence. The applied side of her work considers literacy issues and orthographic choices confronting the representation of creoles in education, as in the case of Cape Verdean Creole.
She is currently involved in three collaborative projects: a psycholinguistic experiment testing the convergence hypothesis in creole genesis (with Susan Gelman and Erica Beck), a project using field data to document language variation on two main islands of Cape Verde (with Saidu Bangura, Eric Brown, and Emanuel de Pina), and a project reconstructing the ancestry of Cape Verde founding populations (with Paul Verdu and Noah Rosenberg).
Professor Baptista teaches Languages in Contact, Pidgins and Creoles, Comparative Linguistics, Introduction to Syntax, and a seminar on creole syntax. She is co-chair of Eric Brown's Ph.D. dissertation committee and advisor to several other graduate students; she recently directed Justin Wedes's undergraduate honors thesis "Bare Necessities: A Quantitative Study of Bare Noun Frequency in Cape Verdean Creole." She is co-director of the Winter 2012 University of Michigan Theme Semester on language (http://language.lsa.umich.edu/). She is president of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (2011-2013), and she was chair of the Linguistic Society of America's Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (2006-2008). She is also an associate member of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (France) (2006-present), officer for the Comité International des Études Créoles, France (2002-present), and president of the Fiscal Council of the Association for Portuguese and Spanish-based Creoles (2003-2006).
Selected Publications
- 2002 The Syntax of Cape Verdean Creole: The Sotavento Varieties. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; nominated for the 2003 Gustav O. Arlt Award in the Humanities).
- 2007 Noun Phrases in Creole Languages: A Multi-faceted Approach, (co-edited with Jacqueline Guéron). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2009 Economy, innovation, and degrees of complexity in creole formation. In Enoch Aboh and Norval Smith, eds., Complex Processes in New Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2010 Cape Verdean Creole in education: a linguistic and human right (with Inês Brito and Saídu Bangura). In Bettina Migge, Isabelle Léglise, and Angela Bartens, eds., Creoles and Education. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2011 On the development of verbal and nominal morphology in four lusophone creoles. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne de Linguistique.
- (In press) On universal grammar, the bioprogram hypothesis, and creole genesis: an interview with Noam Chomsky. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.
