Contact

Department of Speech Language Pathology
College of Medicine and Health Sciences

United Arab Emirates University, PO Box 15555

email: dimitrios_n[at]uaeu.ac.ae

Malagasy Ammonite , collected in the summer of 2005 during field work in Tana

Profile

I graduated with a PhD from the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. My MA dissertation explored a left periphery for the DP domain based on facts from NP-ellipsis in Greek and other languages, as well as discontinuous structures in the DP domain. In my PhD dissertation I proposed a syntactic analysis of Malagasy nominalizations in particular and of all deverbal nominals more generally. I especially worked on the hypothesis that participant nominals have a relative clause source, a line of research which I still pursue today from a broader typological perspective.

My work on syntax, especially of the nominal domain, and the syntax-morphology interface, plays an important role in my parallel work on first language acquisition. I have worked (in collaboration with Nina Hyams, Jeannette Gundel, Ali Idrissi, Marta Szreder and others) on the acquisition of voice morphology and the pronominal system, and the development of referring expressions in Malagasy, and the acquisition of definiteness, possession, and voice morphology, and the investigation of possible developmental stages for child Emirati Arabic. I an currently working on the development of negation and a possibleRoot Infinitive stage in Emirati Arabic.

I believe that theoretical investigations are only valid if grounded in solid empirical observations and to this purpose I have worked to develop adult and child corpora in Malagasy and Emirati Arabic and to make these corpora available to other researchers.

My administrative work has included the curriculum development for the General Linguistics program at the Department of Cognitive Sciences (Former Department of Linguistics), UAEU and more recently the development of a new BSc in Speech Language Pathology. I have worked in committees pursuing the accreditation of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at UAEU served as Program Coordinator for the  Linguistics Program and am currently the Chair of the newly formed Department of Speech Language Pathology.

For an extensive list of my publications, administrative work, and teaching, see my curriculum vitae.