Donca Steriade (born 1951 in Bucharest) is a professor of

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, specializing in phonological theory.

Education

She began her academic career studying classics in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...

, after earning her B.A. (''licență'') in Philology from the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest ( ro, Universitatea din București), commonly known after its abbreviation UB in Romania, is a public university founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princel ...

in 1974. She left Romania after her father emigrated to

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. (She is the daughter of neuroscientist Mircea Steriade.) She earned her M.A. from

Université Laval Université Laval is a public research university in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. The university was founded by royal charter issued by Queen Victoria in 1852, with roots in the founding of the Séminaire de Québec in 1663 by François de Montmo ...

in 1976, She studied for her PhD at the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy under

Morris Halle Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-American, Latvian-born Jewish United States, American Linguistics, linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute ...

. Her 1982 dissertation is titled, "Greek prosodies and the nature of syllabification". After earning her PhD, she took up a position at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

before returning to MIT to become Professor of Linguistics.

Honors

Steriade was named ''Professor Honoris Causa'' by the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bucharest in 2017. She was inducted as a LSA (Linguistics Society of America) Fellow in 2015. She was invited to give the Edward Sapir lecture at th
2009 LSA Linguistic Institute
and she was an instructor at the 2007 LSA Linguistic Institute.

Research

Steriade's research focuses on

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

and

morphophonology Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (mi ...

, and she is considered a leading contributor to theories of

underspecification In theoretical linguistics, underspecification is a phenomenon in which certain features are omitted in underlying representations. Restricted underspecification theory holds that features should only be underspecified if their values are predicta ...

(Steriade 1995) and neutralization (Steriade 2007). She has also researched the basic units of rhythm in language. She has worked on a range of

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

and has published and co-published broadly, including journal articles and book chapters. She is a co-editor of the widely cited volume, ''Phonetically Based Phonology'' (Hayes et al. 2004), and co-author of the popular textbook, ''Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory'' (Hayes et al. 1999).

Key publications

* Hayes, Bruce, Robert Kirchner and Donca Steriade. 2004. ''Phonetically Based Phonology''. Cambridge University Press. *Hayes, Bruce et al. 1999. ''Linguistics: an Introduction to Linguistics Theory''. Wiley-Blackwell. *Steriade, Donca (2007) Contrast. In ''The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology'', ed. P. de Lacy. Cambridge University Press, pp. 139–158. *Steriade, Donca (2002) The Syllable. In ''The International Encyclopedia of Linguistics'', ed. W. Frawley. Oxford University Press. *Steriade, Donca (2001) Directional asymmetries in place assimilation: A perceptual account. In ''The Role of Speech Perception in Phonology'', eds. E. Hume and K. Johnson, pp 219–250. New York: Academic Press. * Steriade, Donca (2000) Paradigm uniformity and the phonetics-phonology boundary. In ''Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the Lexicon'', eds. M. B. Broe and J. B. Pierrehumbert, 313–334. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Steriade, Donca (1995) Underspecification and markedness. In J. Goldsmith (ed.) ''The Handbook of Phonological Theory''. Oxford: Blackwell, pp 114–174. * Steriade, Donca (1988) Reduplication and syllable transfer in Sanskrit and elsewhere. ''Phonology'' 5, 73-155. * Steriade, Donca (1987) Locality conditions and feature geometry. ''Proceedings of NELS 17,'' 595–618.

References

External links

* http://linguistics.mit.edu/user/steriade/ * http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/steriade/steriade.htm * https://mit.academia.edu/DoncaSteriade {{DEFAULTSORT:Steriade, Donca 1951 births Living people Linguists MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty University of California, Los Angeles faculty Université Laval alumni University of Bucharest alumni Romanian emigrants to Canada Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America Women linguists Phonologists MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni