Congratulations to Linguistics Professor Savithry Namboodiripad on her recent promotion to Associate Professor with tenure. Dr. Namboodiripad joined the Linguistics Department in 2017 and is the director of the Contact, Cognition, and Change Lab.
Professor Namboodiripad studies language contact, typology, and variation, particularly within the domain of constituent order. Her work often involves experimental methods and has contributed evidence in favor of a gradient, rather than categorical, approach to constituent order distribution across different languages. These research contributions are strongly represented in Levinsha, Namboodiripad, et al. (2023), which presents an argument in favor of gradient models of word order. She also studies the field of linguistics itself, with a number of works focused on theoretical assumptions, methodological practices, and academia in the field. One of the major contributions she has made in this area is her work arguing against the concept of “native speakers/signers” as objective analytic categories, instead arguing for the use of finer-grained profiles of individual language experience. This work is represented in a number of publications, including Birkeland et al. (2024), published in Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America.
Professor Namboodiripad has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the department covering a wide range of areas, such as language and discrimination, language acquisition, language contact, experimental syntax, and typology. Her teaching is marked by high student engagement and has resulted in a number of successful opportunities for students to participate in collaborative research with her. Dr. Namboodiripad’s teaching, research, and service have a strong focus on social justice. Examples of this include the development and execution of one of the first climate surveys in the field of linguistics, presented as a talk at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in 2019, and her participation as one of the founders of the ROLE Collective, a cross-institution group working to bring policy changes to reduce harm created by essentialist approaches to language.
