In search of grammatical architecture behind words

When not in a classroom or laboratory, Maria Polinsky spends time doing fieldwork off the southeast coast of Africa, in Madagascar. She studies Malagasy, a melting-pot language whose influences start in Borneo and now borrow from Swahili, Arabic, and French.

Or you might find Harvard’s newest professor of linguistics in the Eurasian Caucasus, just south of her native Russia. She calls this region of mountains and lowlands “a linguist’s paradise” or “a mountain of tongues” because of its linguistic variety. Languages there belong to three separate linguistic families.

Polinsky, the first woman to hold a senior position in linguistics at Harvard, studies two of those families, and this spring taught a course in linguistic field methods.