Structuring Sense

Hagit Borer develops a new model of word formation, arguing that on the one hand the basic building blocks of language are rigid semantic and syntactic functions, while on the other hand they are roots, which in themselves are but packets of phonological information, and are devoid of both meaning and grammatical properties of any kind.

Hagit Borer is a Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to that, she held positions at the University of Southern California and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her main research focuses on the interaction between syntactic structure and word structure, an area that she has pursued from a syntactic perspective, from a morphological perspective, from a semantic perspective, and from the perspective of child language acquisition.