About
Acrisio Pires is Associate Professor of Linguistics. His research focuses primarily on syntactic theory and comparative syntax, especially within Minimalism. Among some questions that have guided his work are: What constitutes an appropriate theory of human linguistic knowledge, considering syntax and areas it interfaces with? How can such a theory explain variation across human languages? What contribution can comparative syntax and morphosyntax make to the development of scientific models of language? How can linguistic theory and language acquisition research contribute to the explanation of how language change takes place? Three of his current projects include a book in preparation for Cambridge University Press on syntactic theory from a comparative perspective, a joint project with his PhD student Chao-Ting (Tim) Chou on the bilingual acquisition of English and Chinese syntax, and a joint interdisciplinary project on the acquisition of complementation across Portuguese dialects, with colleagues in Europe, the US and Africa.
Professor Acrisio Pires has taught courses in syntax (introduction to syntax, graduate syntax, syntactic theory, Minimalism, comparative syntax), semantics, and a course on language and cognition, with a focus on interfaces between syntax, language acquisition and language change. He has advised or co-advised Ph.D. students carrying out research in syntactic theory, Minimalism, comparative syntax and language acquisition, focusing on English, Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Sinhala, Berber, Russian, Hawaiian, Croatian, Korean and Arabic. His current Ph.D. advisees are Ph.D. candidates David Medeiros and Tim Chou, and pre-candidates Sujeewa Hettiarachchi and Will Nediger. Former Ph.D. advisees include Christopher Becker (Lecturer, University of Michigan/Oakland University), Gerardo Fernandez-Salgueiro (Tenure-track, National Taiwan Normal University), Dina Kapetangianni (Adjunct faculty, Otterbein College), Hamid Ouali (Associate Professor, U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), and Andrea Stiasny (Lecturer, Romance Languages, University of Michigan). He has also advised many undergraduate honors students focusing primarily on syntactic theory, Minimalism and/or syntactic change, including Natasha Abner (PhD student at UCLA), Emily Coppess, Charles Crissman (PhD Student in Mathematics, Berkeley U.), Nayana Dhavan (MS in Public Health, Harvard U.), Ed Cormany (PhD student at Cornell U.), Lauren Friedman (PhD student at U. of Pennsylvania) and Shang Kong (Law School, UofM).
Professor Pires is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Linguistics Department and a member of the Advisory Board at LACS/Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He is also currently a member of two committees at the Linguistic Society of America: the Nominating Committee and Linguistics in Higher Education (LiHE).
Selected publications
- 2006 The Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains: Gerunds and Infinitives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2009 Minimalist Inquiries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition: Case Studies across Portuguese (co-edited with Jason Rothman). In Series Studies on Language Acquisition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- 2005 EPP in T: More controversial subjects (with Samuel D. Epstein and T. Daniel Seely). Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental and Interdisciplinary Research.
- 2007 The derivation of clausal gerunds. Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental and Interdisciplinary Research.
- 2007 The syntax of Wh-in-situ and Common Ground (with Heather L. Taylor). Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
- 2008 How much syntactic reconstruction is possible? (with Sarah G. Thomason). In G. Ferraresi and M. Goldbach, eds., Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- 2009 Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: An explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars (with Jason Rothman). International Journal of Bilingualism.
- 2010 What’s lost when languages are? Science.
- 2010 On the (un)-ambiguity of adjectival interpretations in L2 Spanish: Informing debates on the mental representations of L2 syntax (with Jason Rothman, Tiffany Judy, and Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes). Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 2011 L1 acquisition across Portuguese dialects: Modular and interdisciplinary interfaces as sources of explanation (with Jason Rothman and Ana L. Santos). Lingua.
