Homepage of Heidi Harley

Associate Professor of Linguistics

Associate, Cognitive Science Program
Associate, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Program
Syntax Research Lab
Syntax, Morphology, Lexical Semantics, Psycholinguistics

I completed my B.A. at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, where I did a double major in Linguistics and English, and edited the student paper, The Muse. Syntax courses with Leslie Saxon inspired me to apply to graduate school in linguistics, and I entered the doctoral program in linguistics at MIT, where I was supervised by Alec Marantz. After graduation, I was funded for two years by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania department of Linguistics, where I worked on event structure and morphology with Rolf Noyer, and collaborated long-distance with Andrew Carnie on work on the structure of Irish. Before starting my postdoc, in the 1995/96 academic year, Phillip Miller hired me to teach in the U.F.R. Angellier at the Université de Lille III, Lille, France. During that period, I also participated in the research of the Paris Possession Group, organized by Jacqueline Guéron.

From September 1997-August 1999 I continued working at UPenn funded by a postdoctoral grant from the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, working with Tony Kroch of the linguistics department, Aravind Joshi of the computer science department, and computer science graduate student Seth Kulick. I also collaborated with Elizabeth Ritter, of the University of Calgary Dept. of Linguistics, working on the structure of pronominal features.

In the fall of 1999, I began working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona in the Department of Linguistics . I received tenure in April 2006. I'm on the steering committe of the  Cognitive Science program the L2 Analysis committe of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program, and the Anthro/Ling program faculty. Since arriving, I've begun collaborations with Tom Bever, Erin O'Bryan and Raffaella Folli on the processing of event structure; with Simin Karimi and Raffaella Folli on the structure of Persian complex predicates, and with Raffaella Folli on the structure of the vP in Italian and English. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and I have co-taught a course on lexical semantics in philosophy and linguistics, and Andrew Carnie and I have continued our collaboration on VSO order, hosting, with our colleague Sheila Dooley-Colberg, an NSF-sponsored conference in spring 2003. Eloise Jelinek introduced me to the Yaqui language (also known as Hiaki and Yoeme), and, together with Maria Amarillas, director of the Pascua Yaqui tribe's language program, I looked at the very interesting properties of reduplication in the language. Funded by a DEL grant from the NSF, Jason Haugen and I are investigating Hiaki's verbal argument-structure-changing morphology in 2005-2007.

At Arizona, I have supervised the dissertation research of graduate studentsJason Haugen, Jeongrae Lee, Azita Taleghani, Shannon Bischoff, Luis Barragan, Angelina Chatreva, and William Alexander.

While visiting Cambridge University in the summer of 2004, working with Raffaella Folli on a British Academy Joint International Activities grant, I taught a seminar on the vP at Oxford University. I was invited to be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard in Spring 2005, where I taught a seminar on roots and a field methods class on Finnish. I have also taught at the GLOW summer school, in Stuttgart in 2006, and at the ABRALIN summer school, in Rio in 2003 and in Belo Horizonte in 2007.