Gabriella Hermon is an American linguist, professor emerita at the University of Delaware.

Career

Hermon received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois in 1981, and has taught at San Diego State University, and the University of Illinois, as well as the University of Delaware. Hermon is one of the leading experts in the syntax of the Austronesian languages of Indonesia and Malaysia. She is especially well known for her work on voice and question formation in the

Malay Malay may refer to: Languages * Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore ** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century ** Indonesi ...

spoken in rural

Sumatra Sumatra is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the sixth-largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 (182,812 mi.2), not including adjacent i ...

, but an additional important contribution is her participation in a large scale study of language acquisition by children in

Jakarta Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...

. This study documents how children acquire Indonesian, and is one of the few such studies of language acquisition in major Asian languages. She has published numerous articles in such major journals as '' Language'', ''

Linguistic Inquiry ''Linguistic Inquiry'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal in generative linguistics published by the MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Un ...

'' and '' Lingua''. She was married to fellow linguist

Peter Cole Peter Cole is a MacArthur-winning poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981. He has been called "o ...

(1941-2023), with whom she regularly conducted joint research.

Publications

Among Dr. Hermon's best known works are her 1985 book, "Syntactic Modularity", published by Foris; her 2002 article "The Typology of Wh-Movement, Wh-Questions in Malay" published in ''Syntax''; her 1994 book (edited) ''Language in the Andes'', published by the Latin American Studies Program of the University of Delaware; and her 2008 article, "Voice in Malay/Indonesian", published in ''Lingua''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hermon, Gabriella Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Linguists from the United States University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni American women linguists University of Delaware faculty