Alice C. Harris

For over 40 years, Alice Harris has been examining and analyzing the structure and historical development of languages of the Caucasus, especially Georgian and Udi, which are among the most structurally complex languages in the world. Her focus has been on the word structure (morphology) and sentence structure (syntax) and what these languages reveal about the organizational principles of morphology and syntax in human language in general. Through a combination of textual work and fieldwork, she has brought to light numerous ways in which the evidence of these languages clarifies key issues in both linguistic theory and historical linguistics.

Having received a B.A. from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, an M.A. from the University of Essex (England), and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976, Harris held positions at Vanderbilt University and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook before coming to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2009, where she is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics.

Harris’s 1995 book, Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1995), with Lyle Campbell, won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 1998, and in the same year she won The Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research, Vanderbilt University. Other awards include the Erskine Fellowship, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1999; a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo, 2004-05; Outstanding Alumna Award (Randolph-Macon Woman’s College), 2004, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, 2009-2010. In 2011 she held the Collitz Professorship for the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics Institute at the University of Colorado. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2016. In 2020 she was named Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.