Marlyse Baptista

Marlyse Baptista, Uriel Weinreich Collegiate Professor of Linguistics, studies the morphosyntax interface in pidgin and creole languages. She also examines theories of language creation and language change; her current work investigates the cognitive processes involved in contact situations and focuses on the role of congruence in L2 acquisition, bilingualism and creole genesis and development. She recently completed a manuscript where she investigates the role of congruence in 20 pidgins and creoles across 19 grammatical domains and developed a model accounting for how congruence may operate (Language, March 2020). She is currently involved in three collaborative projects: 1) a psycholinguistic experiment testing the role of congruence in a multilingual setting (with Susan Gelman, Rawan Bonais, Danielle Labotka and Emily Sabo), 2) a project using field data and DNA samples to reconstruct the ancestry of Cape Verde founding populations (with geneticists Paul Verdu, Noah Rosenberg, Trevor Pemberton, Ethan Jewett and linguists Sérgio Costa and Valentin Thouzeau), and 3) a project developing a computational model of language emergence, using 18^th century Haitian Creole texts (with computational scientists Ken Kollman, Alton Worthington and mathematician Jinho Baik).

Professor Baptista teaches Languages in Contact, Pidgins and Creoles, Perspectives on Bilingualism, Comparative Linguistics, Introduction to Syntax, first-year seminars, a graduate seminar on Creole Syntax, Language in a Multicultural World and more recently Language and Discrimination. She is currently advising or co-advising Rawan Bonais, Danielle Burgess, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales, Joy Peltier, Emily Sabo, and Yourdanis Sedarous. Former advisees at the University of Michigan include Ariana Bancu (2019), Alicia Stevers (2019), Candice Scott (2016) and Tridha Chatterjee (2015) (see home page for students’ positions and areas of expertise). 

She is currently an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America, she is past president of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, an associate member of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (Structures Formelles du Langage- Paris, France), a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows. She is a US Delegate for Linguistics for Oxford University Press and Associate Editor to Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America.  

Affiliation(s)

• Core faculty of the Linguistics Department
• Core faculty of the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science
• Faculty Affiliate to the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies

Field(s) of Study

• Contact linguistics, syntactic theory, morphosyntax of pidgins and creoles, bilingualism, theories of language creation and change.