Acrisio Pires

Acrisio Pires is professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where is also affiliated with the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His research focuses on linguistic theory, language acquisition, bilingualism, language change, and how these domains of research relate to each other. He is the author of the book The Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains: Gerunds and Infinitives (John Benjamins) and co-editor of the book Minimalist Inquiries in Child and Adult Language Acquisition: Case Studies across Portuguese (Mouton De Gruyter). His research has also appeared in refereed journals including Bilingualism and Language Cognition, Syntax, the International Journal of Bilingualism and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. He has advised or co-advised fourteen PhD students carrying out research in linguistic theory, Minimalism, comparative linguistics and first/bilingual language acquisition, investigating the grammars and/or language acquisition of American Sign Language, English, Bengali, Bora (an Amazonian native language), Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Sinhala, Berber, Russian, Hawaiian, Croatian, Korean and Arabic.

Current Work:

Some of Acrisio Pires' current projects include a book in preparation for Cambridge University Press, on syntactic theory from a comparative perspective, and various joint projects with his PhD students: with Will Nediger, on the syntax and semantics of differential object marking in L2 Spanish and the nature of inversion in Canadian French; with Sujeewa Hettiarachchi on the acquisition of constraints on wh-movement; with Tridha Chatterjee on the acquisition of Indian English by Bengali-English bilinguals; with former PhD student Chao-Ting (Tim) Chou on the acquisition of Chinese syntax by English-Chinese bilinguals.

Research Area Keyword(s):

linguistics, cognition, bilingualism, language learning, linguistic diversity