Jeffrey (Jeff) Lidz is a

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

professor at the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

, currently serving as chair of the linguistics department. His research focuses on

syntactic 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 (constituency ...

aspects of

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...

Career

Lidz received his PhD from the

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially known as UD, UDel, or Delaware) is a Statutory college#Delaware, privately governed, state-assisted Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Newark, Delaware, United States. UD offers f ...

in 1996 and held postdoctoral fellowships at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

and Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique from 1997 to 2000 and in 1998, respectively. As a postdoc at UPenn, he studied

Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...

, finding that despite its

causative In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

, two-year-olds acquiring Kannada rely on number of overt NPs when making judgements about novel word meanings. He worked as an assistant professor at

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

from 2000 to 2005 before moving to the University of Maryland. Lidz was named a Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 2015. Much of Lidz's research focuses on the syntactic details of child language acquisition. His findings show evidence of significant syntactic development in 18-month-olds, including understandings of long-range dependency and parts of speech. Articles by Lidz arguing for the necessity of

Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

's theory of Universal Grammar have appeared in ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' and ''

The Conversation ''The Conversation'' is a 1974 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who faces a moral dilemma when his recordings reveal a potential ...

''. Lidz was the editor-in-chief for ''

Language Acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...

'' from 2013 to 2020 and edited/co-authored the ''Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lidz, Jeffrey Living people University of Delaware alumni Linguists from the United States 21st-century linguists University of Maryland, College Park faculty Syntacticians Year of birth missing (living people)