Maria A. Babyonyshev - Research Interests
Syntactic theory: argument structure, aspect, and unaccusativity diagnostics; optionality within the minimalist framework of grammar; the interaction of obligatory movement operations and discourse/interpretation.
First language acquisition: verbal and nominal inflections and the corresponding functional projections in early grammars; maturation of argument structure, UTAH, and movement operations; acquisition of Russian.
Sentence processing: the processing complexity of unambiguous center-embedded structures; the role of nominal morphology in sentence processing; the mechanisms of reanalysis; the processing of head-final structures.
Slavic and East Asian languages: unaccusativity diagnostics in free word order languages; genitive of negation; the syntactic and discourse properties of scrambling operations; cross-linguistic variation in the availability of certain semantic classes of verbs.
