Donca Steriade


Donca Steriade is a professor of Linguistics at MIT. Prior to this, she was a professor of Linguistics at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. from MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in 1982, her M.A. from Université Laval in 1976, and her B.A. in Philology from the University of Bucharest in 1974. She was inducted as LSA Fellow in 2015. She was invited to give the Edward Sapir lecture at the and she was an instructor at the 2007 LSA Linguistic Institute. She is the daughter of neuroscientist Mircea Steriade.

Research

Steriade's research focuses on phonology and morphophonology and she is now one of the world's leading phonologists, especially as pertaining to her leading work on underspecification and neutralization. She began her academic career studying classics in Bucharest, but left after her father emigrated to Canada. She later matriculated to MIT to study under Morris Halle to investigate the universal elements of language. Her dissertation was entitled, "Greek prosodies and the nature of syllabification". She has since worked on a range of Indo-European languages and has published and co-published broadly, including journal articles, book chapters, and the widely cited books Phonetically Based Phonology and Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory.

Key publications