Hi! My name is Naomi Lee, and I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at NYU. I will be joining Baruch College as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. [CV]
I’m a morphosyntactician, and I work with theory and typology, learning experiments, and computational simulations. I’m interested in the substance and the structure of the extended nominal projection, and how language acquirers approach their hypothesis space for learning nominal inflection and adnominal agreement/concord.
My dissertation is about nominal features: investigating the representation and simulating the learning of number, gender, and noun class, and is chaired by Maria Gouskova and Alec Marantz. In it, I ask which nominal categories it is plausible to represent with innate syntactico-semantic features, and what is cross-linguistically fixed (or variable) about the syntax of those features. I am running artificial language learning experiments: some probe the internal organization (cross-classifying or linear?) of those innate syntactico-semantic features, and others explore the linguistic and statistical characteristics of the input that learners need to induce non-innate formal syntactic features relevant for inflection and agreement. I am computationally simulating different learning algorithms and representations that could be used in acquiring DP morphosyntax, in order to see which behave most similarly to human learners with similar input. I’m curious whether interim states in these learning simulations resemble child language and/or diachronic innovations.
Other interests lie in morphological and syntactic variation (work with Laurel MacKenzie explores how syntactic classes of English particle verbs condition verb-particle order), and fieldwork on nominal morphosyntax in Khoekhoe (Khoe-Kwadi language family) and Bunun (Formosan, Austronesian language family).
I led the syntax talk series Syntax Brown Bag from 2018–2021 and was President of the Linguistics Association at NYU (LANYU) in the 2018–19 academic year. Prior to NYU, I was a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company, where I worked with clients across many industries, but got the most energy from public sector and higher education work. I received my A.B. from Princeton University with an Independent Concentration in Linguistics. My senior thesis evaluated the ability of synchronic phonological and morphological theoretical representations to serve as diachronic units of analysis.
contact me: naomilee(æt)nyu.edu