Professor of Linguistics
About
Acrisio Pires is a Professor of Linguistics. His research and teaching focus on linguistic theory and Minimalism syntax, comparative syntax, language change, language acquisition, and bilingualism. Among some questions that have guided his work are: What constitutes an appropriate theory of human linguistic knowledge, considering syntax and areas with which it interfaces? How can cross-linguistic variation in syntax and morphosyntax be explained? What contributions can comparative syntax research make to the development of explanatory models of language? How does language acquisition interact with language change? What factors can explain different effects of billingualism, language contact and second language acquisition?
Professor Pires has advised and co-advised Ph.D students carrying out research in syntactic theory, Minimalism, comparative syntax, language acquisition and bilingualism/language contact, and a particular empirical focus on languages including English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Greek, Sinhala, Berber, Hawaiian, Croatian, and Korean.
Professor Pires is particularly interested in research in two distince areas:
(i) syntactic theory and minimalism, also with a focus on comparative syntax, syntactic variation and syntax interfaces.
(ii) bilingualism/multilingualism across the lifespan, including second language acquisition/learning, heritage/immersion bilingualism, and language contact/language change, in particular regarding syntax and morphosyntax. The empirical focus of this research is more likely to be on languages he has more familiarity with, including some Romance Languages (Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian), English, German, Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.
He has been the (co-)chair of 18 Ph.D. dissertations, of advisees including:
- Hamid Ouali (Professor, U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
- Sujeewa Hettiarachchi (Senio Lecturer [=Associate Professor in US system], Newcastle University)
- David J. Medeiros (Associate Professor, California State University, Northridge)
- Rawan Bonais (Linguist, Advantis Global)
- Tim Chou (Associate Professor, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)
- Alan Ke (Assistant Professor, Michigan State University)
- Gerardo Fernandez-Salgueiro (Associate Professor, National Taiwan Normal University)
- Dina Kapetangianni (Senior Lecturer, University of North Texas)
- Yushi Sugimoto (Assistant Professor, Osaka University, Japan)
- Andrew McInnerney (Postdoctoral fellow, University of Michigan)
- Yourdanis Sedarous (Lecturer, University of Michigan)
- Marcus Berger (sociolinguistic, US Census Bureau)
- Tridha Chatterjee (Lecturer, San Jose State University)
- Andrea Stiansy (Lecturer, Romance Languages, University of Michigan)
Professor Pires has also advised many undergraduate honors students who worked on syntactic theory, Minimalism and/or syntactic change and went on to pursue careers in linguistics and related fields.
Currently PhD (co-)advisees:
- Lucy Chiang
- Aliaksei Akimenka
- Cecilia Solis-Barroso
- Ahmed Farahat
- Danuta Allen
- Aya Halabi
- Sid Bhushan
- Simon Campos
Affiliation(s)
- Linguistics
- Weinberg Institute of Cognitive Science (faculty affiliate)
- Romance Languages and Literatures
- Latin American and Caribbean Studies (faculty affiliate)
Field(s) of Study
- Syntactic theory
- Minimalism
- Comparative syntax and morphosyntax
- Syntactic variation and change
- Language acquisition
- Bilingualism and multilingualism
- Language contact
- Syntax-semantics interface
