Diane Massam


Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist. She earned her PhD under Noam Chomsky in 1985 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently an emeritus professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto.
Massam specializes in the syntax of Niuean, an Austronesian language spoken in the South Pacific country of Niue. She developed an analysis of a type of verb plus noun compounding called noun incorporation which has opened a window to analyze similar phenomena in other languages. Her analysis also proposed a novel way of understanding the relationship between a subject and its predicate. She was a keynote speaker at the 21st annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association in 2014.
She serves on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, and on the Editorial Board of the journal Linguistic Inquiry. Massam was appointed Vice-President of the Canadian Linguistic Association in 2015. Upon completion of her two-year term in this position she served as President of the CLA from 2017-2019.

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