91Ô­´´

Biography

Benjamin Bruening, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the 91Ô­´´. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 2001 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The focus of his linguistic research is syntax and its interactions with morphology and semantics. Bruening co-organized the Syntax-Semantics Lab (SySeL) with Satoshi Tomioka, Ph.D., professor of linguistics and cognitive science.

More specific interests include the following:

• The syntax and morphology of the Algonquian languages Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Mi'kmaq, spoken in Maine and the Maritime Provinces of Canada; see my Ph.D. dissertation, Syntax at the Edge: Cross-Clausal Phenomena and the Syntax of Passamaquoddy (MIT, 2001), available from ;
• Ditransitive constructions in various languages;
• Auxiliaries and inversion in English;
• The nature of reflexivity;
• The syntax and semantics of reciprocals;
• Wh-scope marking and wh-copying in the languages of the world;
• The connection between morphology and phonology in Semitic languages;
• Neurolinguistics and sentence processing;
• Purely syntactic approaches to word formation.