Her research is primarily in syntax, particularly the interaction between binding and syntactic movement. She has also explored the syntax of applicatives, the morphological representation of person, and the interpretation of idioms. Her central expertise is in Minimalist syntactic theory and the theory of Distributed Morphology. She is also interested in language acquisition, language and mind, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and fictional languages. She has investigated many languages, including Albanian, Chichewa, English, French, German, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Navajo, Ojibwe, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Yoruba — and is enthusiastic to learn more about languages spoken in the Victoria area.
Recent Publications and Presentations
Refereed articles
McGinnis, Martha. In press. Person. Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan.1000-word entry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (To appear September 2010.)
McGinnis, Martha. 2008. Applicatives. Language and Linguistic Compass 2:6, 1225–1245. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00078.x
McGinnis, Martha. 2008. Phi-feature competition in morphology and syntax. In Phi-Theory: Phi-Features across Modules and Interfaces, ed. Daniel Harbour, David Adger and Susana Béjar. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 155 –184.
McGinnis, Martha. 2005. On markedness asymmetries in person and number. Language 81:3, 699–718.
McGinnis, Martha. 2004. Lethal ambiguity. Linguistic Inquiry 35.1, 47–95.
McGinnis, Martha. 2002. On the systematic aspect of idioms. Linguistic Inquiry 33.4, 665–672.
McGinnis, Martha. 2001. Variation in the phase structure of applicatives. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 1, 105–146.
Phillips, Colin, Alec Marantz, Elron Yellin, Tom Pellathy, Martha McGinnis, Ken Wexler, David Poeppel, Tim Roberts. 2000. Auditory cortex accesses phonological categories: An MEG mismatch study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12: 1038–1055.
Edited Volumes
McGinnis, Martha, and Norvin Richards, eds. 2005. Perspectives on Phases. MITWPL 49. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Junker, Marie-Odile, Martha McGinnis, and Yves Roberge, eds. 2005. Proceedings of the 2004 CLA Annual Conference. [http://www.carleton.ca/~mojunker/ACL-CLA/]
Proceedings and working papers
McGinnis, Martha. 2008. A new look at Japanese and Korean scrambling. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 28: Proceedings of the International Conference on East Asian Linguistics, ed. Sarah Clarke, Manami Hirayama, Kyumin Kim and Eugenia Suh. Linguistics Graduate Course Union, University of Toronto, 239–258. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~twpl/volume28.htm
Gonzalez-Poot, Antonio, and Martha McGinnis. 2006. Local versus long-distance fission in Distributed Morphology. Proceedings of the 2005 Canadian Linguistic Association, ed. Claire Gurski. Department of French, University of Western Ontario, 20 pages. http://ling.uwo.ca/publications/CLA-ACL/CLA-ACL2005.htm
McGinnis, Martha. 2005. Painting the wall red for a few hours: A reply to Glasbey (2003). Snippets 10, 9–10.
McGinnis, Martha. 2005. UTAH at Merge: Evidence from multiple applicatives. In Perspectives on Phases, ed. Martha McGinnis and Norvin Richards. MITWPL 49. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 183–200.
Refereed Conference Presentations
McGinnis, Martha. 2010. Evidence for the syntactic attachment of -able. Paper presented at the CUNY Conference on the Word. CUNY, New York, NY, January 14–15.
McGinnis, Martha. 2009. Irreversible binding. Paper presented at the 40th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 40). MIT, Cambridge, MA, November 13–15. [To appear in the Proceedings.]
McGinnis, Martha and Kara Bashutski. 2008. A-scrambling obeys Superiority. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, May 31–June 2, University of British Columbia, BC.
McGinnis, Martha. 2007. Deconstructing A- and A-bar movement. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, May 26–29, University of Saskatchewan, SK.
Invited Presentations
Martha McGinnis. 2010. Evidence for the syntactic attachment of -able. Simon Fraser University, July 8.
Martha McGinnis. 2010. The tour of Dr. Syntax in search of the picturesque. University of Victoria, March 19.
Martha McGinnis. 2007. Lecture series on Distributed Morphology. University of São Paulo, Brazil, August 20–24.
Martha McGinnis. 2007. Implications of Distributed Morphology for language acquisition. Psycholinguistics and Linguistic Theory: Attempts at a Dialogue. University of São Paulo, Brazil, August 13–14.
Martha McGinnis. 2007. LF binding and types of XP-movement. Syntax at the Interfaces Workshop, University of Calgary, AB.
Other Presentations
McGinnis, Martha and Kara Bashutski. 2008. A-scrambling obeys Superiority. Workshop on Syntax and its Interfaces, May 21, University of Calgary, AB.
Martha McGinnis. 2007. The morphosyntax of first person. Alberta Conference on Linguistics, Banff, AB, October 20.
Interviews
Everett, Daniel, David Pesetsky and Martha McGinnis (guests), and Russell Smith (host). 2007. Universal Grammar. And Sometimes Y, Season 2, Episode 25. CBC Radio 1, broadcast June 23 and 25. http://www.cbc.ca/andsometimesy/pastshows.html?UG
Kisa, Sonja Elen, Christian Bök and Martha McGinnis (guests), and Jane Farrow (host). 2007. Invented languages. And Sometimes Y, Season 3, Episode 7. CBC Radio 1, broadcast October 20 and 22. http://www.cbc.ca/andsometimesy/pastshows.html?s3-ep7
Martha McGinnis-Archibald received her B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Toronto, and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. She then held a SSHRC postdoc at the Linguistics Department and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked at the University of Calgary for eleven years before coming to the University of Victoria in 2010. She has been an Associate Editor of the journal Linguistic Inquiry since 2006. She was the Secretary of the Canadian Linguistic Association from 2001-2008 and has been the moderator of the Distributed Morphology e-mail list since 1999. She has held a SSHRC Standard Research Grant on the syntax of movement and binding, and has produced two marvellous daughters.