This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember your browser. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media, and for marketing purposes. By using this website, you accept and agree to be bound by UVic’s Terms of Use and Protection of Privacy Policy.  If you do not agree to the above, you can configure your browser’s setting to “do not track.”

Skip to main content
People Departments Maps Buildings Rooms A-Z
University
of Victoria
Apply Library
Sign in Online tools Sign out
Languages, Linguistics and Cultures

Martha McGinnis

Associate Professor

Linguistics, SLLC

Contact:
Office: CLE D351 250-721-7422
Credentials:
PhD (MIT)
Area(s) of expertise:
Syntax, morphology

Martha McGinnis is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics section of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria.

Bio

Martha McGinnis received her BA in Linguistics and English and her MA in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also held a SSHRC postdoc at the Linguistics Department and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked at the University of Calgary for eleven years before coming to the University of Victoria in 2010. She was the Secretary of the Canadian Linguistic Association from 2001-2008, and has been an Associate Editor of the journal Linguistic Inquiry since 2006. She has held a SSHRC Standard Research Grant on the syntax of movement and binding.

Her research is primarily in syntax, particularly in the syntax of argument structure, and the interaction between binding and syntactic movement. She has explored locality conditions on A-movement; the syntax of applicatives, causatives, and nominalizations; the morphosyntactic representation of person and number; and the interpretation of idioms. Her theoretical expertise is in Minimalist syntactic theory and the theory of Distributed Morphology. She is also interested in neurolinguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language and mind, and constructed languages. She has investigated many languages, including Albanian, Chicheŵa, English, French, German, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Navajo, Ojibwe, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Yoruba — and has supervised student research on Mandarin, SENĆOŦEN, Turkish, Ukrainian and Belorusian.

Courses