Prof. Julia Horvath

Julia Horvath received her PhD degree in Linguistics at UCLA. It was followed by a Sloan post-doctoral fellowship at the Cognitive Science group (School of Social Sciences) of the University of California, Irvine; subsequently, she was hired by Tel-Aviv University on a Yigal Alon fellowship. She is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, in the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies, at Tel-Aviv University. Over the years she has held various visiting positions at MIT, NYU and the University of Toronto. She served as Head of the Department of Linguistics at Tel-Aviv University for 10 years, and was President of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (IATL). Prof. Horvath’s research and body of publications investigate the human language faculty as a component of the human mind; her research program focuses specifically on the role of the syntactic component (the computational system) in models of human linguistic competence and its interfaces with the storage system (mental lexicon) and systems of interpretation and “externalization”. Adopting a biolinguistic perspective, this work involves the empirical study of universal abstract properties natural languages appear to share and the scope of cross-linguistic variation. She pursues this research domain by testing theoretical hypotheses regarding the human language faculty in relation to empirical phenomena of language use and acquisition as manifested in speakers’ grammaticality judgments, quantitative corpus-based studies and psycholinguistic experiments. The major topics Prof. Horvath’s recent research projects and publications have addressed are: Constraining the formal encoding of concepts in the syntax, specifically, a proposed “Strong Modularity Hypothesis” regarding what notions may/may not constitute formal features active in syntactic computations and the status of movement operations apparently driven by discourse-related notions (such as focus, topic, givenness); the division of labor between syntax and the mental lexicon with regard to valence-changing operations; the nature of lexical entries in the storage components of grammar (roots only vs. derived items, the storage of functional vs. lexical elements); sentence-internal code-switching phenomena and their theoretical implications for Late Insertion and a “derivation-by-phase” architecture.