Lisa deMena Travis is a researcher and educator in the field of

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 ...

, specializing in

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 ...

and in the study of

Austronesian Austronesian may refer to: *The Austronesian languages *The historical Austronesian peoples The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Sout ...

languages such as Malagasy and

Tagalog Tagalog may refer to: Language * Tagalog language, a language spoken in the Philippines ** Old Tagalog, an archaic form of the language ** Batangas Tagalog, a dialect of the language * Tagalog script, the writing system historically used for Tagal ...

. She is currently a professor of linguistics at

McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ...

. Her 1984 proposal of the Head Movement Constraint, which seeks to account for limitations on the movement of syntactic heads in question formation, has become a cornerstone of

generative linguistics Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognition, cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generat ...

. Lisa Travis is one of the co-founders of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA), a learned society that provides forums for collaborative research and runs an annual conference. Travis was consulted by the set design team of

Denis Villeneuve Denis Villeneuve Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, OAL (; ; born October 3, 1967) is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. He has received seven Canadian Screen Awards as well as nominations for four Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards, and two ...

's ''Arrival'' during the construction of the workplace sets for the protagonist, a linguist.

Publications

Lisa Travis has contributed to and been an editor for numerous journals, books, and conference proceedings in the field. Some notable examples include: * "Inner Aspect: the articulation of the VP", 2010, Dordrecht:Springer * "Austronesian and Theoretical Linguistics", 2010, Amsterdam:John Benjamins (editor, with Raphael Mercado, Eric Potsdam) * "Bahasa Indonesia as a predicate fronting language", 2008, in ''Lingua'', 18: 1583-1602 * "Voice morphology in Malagasy as Clitic Left Dislocation or through the looking glass: Malagasy in Wonderland", 2006. In Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, Joachim Sabel, eds., ''Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages'', 281-318. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * "Formal issues in Austronesian Linguistics''"'', 2000, Dordrecht:Kluwer Academic Publishers (editor, with I. Paul and V. Phillips)

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Travis, Lisa Demena Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian women linguists Linguists from Canada Canadian women academics Place of birth missing (living people) Academic staff of McGill University Linguists of Austronesian languages