Hilda Judith Koopman is a linguist who does research and fieldwork in the areas of syntax and morphology. She is a professor in the department of Linguistics at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

, and is the director of the SSWL (Syntactic and Semantic Structures of the World's Languages) database. The SSWL, which she together with

Dennis Shasha Dennis Elliot Shasha is an American professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a division of New York University. He is also an associate director of NYU WIRELESS. His current areas of research include work ...

inherited from Chris Collins at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

NYU New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a non-denominational all-male institutio ...

, is an open-ended database of syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties.

Research interests

Hilda Koopman is interested in both

theoretical linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the ...

and field linguistics. Her area of specialization includes linguistic theory, fieldwork,

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

, comparative syntax As a field linguists, she has worked on various (un(der)described) languages. Some of the languages and language family she has worked on include the following:

Kru KRU are a Malaysian pop boy band formed in 1992. The group comprises three Abdul Halim brothers, namely Datuk Norman Abdul Halim, Datuk Yusry Abdul Halim and Edry Abdul Halim'. Apart from revolutionising the Malaysian music scene with their b ...

languages (Vata, Dida, Gbadi..), Gur (Nawdem),

Mande Mande may refer to: * Mandé peoples of western Africa * Mande languages, their Niger-Congo languages * Manding languages, Manding, a term covering a subgroup of Mande peoples, and sometimes used for one of them, Mandinka people, Mandinka * Garo p ...

(Bambara), Kwa (Abe(y)..), Grassfield Bantu (Nweh, Ncufie, Bafanji), West Atlantic language (Wolof, Fulani),

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for National ...

(Ndendeule, Siswati),

Nilotic The Nilotic peoples are peoples Indigenous people of Africa, indigenous to South Sudan and the Nile Valley who speak Nilotic languages. They inhabit South Sudan and the Gambela Region of Ethiopia, while also being a large minority in Kenya, Uga ...

(Maasai, Dholuo),

Austronesian languages The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken ...

(Malagasy, Javanese, Samoan, Tongan),

Creole languages A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fl ...

(Haitian, Sranan, Saramaccan).

Career

Koopman has been a professor of Linguistics at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

since 1985. She served on the editorial boards of

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

(comparative syntax), Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,

Kluwer Academic Publishers Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 in ...

(Book series),

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ''Natural Language & Linguistic Theory'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering theoretical and generative linguistics. It was established in 1983 and originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Since 2004 the journal is pub ...

, and The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.

Selected publications

*1983. ''ECP effects in main clauses'' Linguistic Inquiry, 14(2), pp. 346–350. *1986. "A Note on Long Extraction in Vata and the ECP". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 4(3), pp. 357–374. *1994. "Licensing heads". In D. Lightfoot and N. Hornstein (eds), Verb movement, pp. 261–295. *1997. "Unifying predicate cleft constructions." In K. Moore (ed.), Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 71–85). *2002. "Derivations and complexity filters". In A. Alexiadou, E. Anagnostopoulou, S Barbiers, H Gaertner (eds), Dimensions of Movement: From features to remnants, 48, p. 151-189. *2014b. "Recursion restrictions: Where grammars count." In T. Roeper and M. Speas (eds.), Recursion: Complexity in Cognition (pp. 17–38). Springer International Publishing. *2014a. "The que/qui alternation: new analytical directions" (with Dominique Sportiche). In Peter Svenonius (ed), Functional Structure From Top to Toe. Oxford University Press. *2016. "A Further Step towards a Minimalist Analysis of Japanese -no" (with Tomoko Ishizuka). Presented at the 24th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference. *2017. "Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing" (with Nelson, M.J., El Karoui, I., Giber, K., Yang, X., Cohen, L., Cash, S.S., Naccache, L., Hale, J.T., Pallier, C. and Dehaene, S.). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, p. 201701590.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Koopman, Hilda 1947 births Living people Linguists from the United States Linguists from the Netherlands American women linguists Tilburg University alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty University of Amsterdam alumni People from Nijmegen