Yael Sharvit is an American linguist who is Professor of Linguistics 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 ...

. She specializes in

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

and the syntax-semantics interface.

Career

Sharvit received her PhD in linguistics from

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

in 1997; she was the third person to graduate from the program. Her dissertation title is "The Syntax and Semantics of Functional Relative Clauses." She joined the faculty of the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from Hart ...

in 1999, leaving in 2011 to take up a position at UCLA.

Research

Sharvit is known for her work on tense, including embedded tense (Sharvit 1999), or bound tense (Alxatib & Sharvit 2017), tense in free indirect discourse (Sharvit 2008) and cross-linguistic typologies of tense. She has also contributed to the semantics of questions (Sharvit 2002) and

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...

s, the semantics of attitude verbs,

negative polarity items In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG. The linguistic ...

resumptive pronoun A resumptive pronoun is a personal pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent after a pause or interruption (such as an embedded clause, series of adjectives, or a wh-island), as in ''This is the girli that whenever it r ...

s (Sharvit 1999) and

superlatives Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected to indicate the relative degree of the property they define exhibited by the word or phrase they modify or describe. In languages t ...

(Sharvit & Stateva 2002).

Honors and distinctions

She is an Associate Editor at the ''

Journal of Semantics The ''Journal of Semantics'' is a leading international peer-reviewed journal of semantics of natural languages published by Oxford University Press. Its current editor is Rick Nouwen of Utrecht University. The journal is available online with su ...

''. She also serves as co-editor-in-chief of the journal, ''Linguistics and Philosophy''.

Selected publications

* * * * * * * * Alxatib, Sam; Sharvit, Yael (2017). Bound tense in relative clauses: Evidence from VP-ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 48: 697-711. doi:10.1162/LING_a_00259

References

American women linguists University of California, Los Angeles faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Rutgers University alumni Linguists from the United States American academic journal editors {{US-linguist-stub