astronomy

Maria Polinsky

Maria Polinsky is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Maria Polinsky rather than just read about it. In short: Maria “Masha” Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages. Education and early life Polinsky was born in Moscow, Russia.

Key takeaways

Maria Polinsky belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Maria Polinsky to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Maria Polinsky from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Maria “Masha” Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages.

Education and early life Polinsky was born in Moscow, Russia. She received a B.A. in philology from Moscow University in 1979, an M.A. in 1983, and a Ph.D. in 1986 in linguistics from the Institute for Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her dissertation examined the structure of antipassives in several ergative languages.

Career In 1989, Polinsky joined the University of Southern California as an Andrew Mellon Fellow, becoming an assistant professor in 1991 and an associate professor in 1995. In 1997, she joined UC San Diego as an associate professor, later serving as a full professor and as chair of the Department of Linguistics. She founded the department's Heritage Language Program in 2001. From 2006 to 2015, Polinsky was a professor and Director of the Language Science Lab at Harvard University. In 2015, she took a position the University of Maryland as a professor in the Department of Linguistics and an Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center. At Maryland, she established a research field station in Guatemala.

Research Polinsky's research focuses on the relationship between syntax and information structure (syntactic encoding of topic and focus), left and right dislocation, and syntax-prosody interface. Polinsky has been a pioneer of heritage language study and has played an active role in introducing heritage languages into modern linguistic theory. Her research has explored the ways in which heritage speakers are different from other speakers and learners, and how these differences impact our understanding of language learning. She has also been an active practitioner of experimental work on understudied languages within the fieldwork setting. Recurrent themes in Polinsky's syntactic research include long-distance dependencies, control/raising, ergativity, and scope. Polinsky is a strong advocate of a micro-typological approach to syntax, and she has done extensive primary work on Chukchi, several Austronesian languages (especially Polynesian and Malagasy), Mayan languages and languages of the Caucasus.

Honors Polinsky has been a visiting professor at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig; Amsterdam University; the University of California, Berkeley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She has served as associate editor of the journals Language and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and is currently on the editorial boards of the Heritage Language Journal, Linguistic Discovery, and Linguistics. Since 2007, Polinsky has been the director of the annual Heritage Language Research Institute. In 2015, she was a Forum Lecturer at the Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Summer Institute, and in 2016 she became a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America for "distinguished contributions to the discipline". She is also a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Selected publications S. Montrul and M. Polinsky (eds.) 2022. "The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics". M. Polinsky (ed.) 2021. "The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus". M. Polinsky. 2018. "Heritage Languages and Their Speakers". Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. M. Polinsky. 2016. "Deconstructing Ergativity: Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features," Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. M. Polinsky and O. Kagan. 2007. “Heritage languages: In the 'wild' and in the classroom,” Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 368–395. M. Polinsky. 2006. “Incomplete acquisition: American Russian,” Journal of Slavic Linguistics. M. Polinsky, E. Potsdam. 2002. “Backward control,” Linguistic Inquiry. M. Polinsky, E. Potsdam. 2001. “Long-distance agreement and topic in Tsez,” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. B. Comrie, G. Stone and M. Polinsky. 1996. The Russian language in the twentieth century. Oxford University Press. M. Polinsky. 1995. American Russian: Language loss meets language acquisition, in Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. B. Comrie and M. Polinsky, (eds.) 1993. Causatives and transitivity. John Benjamins.

References

External links Harvard web page Video interview on Heritage Languages Video interview on Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism University of Maryland Linguistics Faculty Page Archived 2020-08-04 at the Wayback Machine

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Maria Polinsky

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Maria Polinsky claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Maria Polinsky before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Maria Polinsky ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Maria Polinsky

In research: Maria Polinsky appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Maria Polinsky in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Maria Polinsky is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 20th-century American non-fiction writers, 20th-century American women non-fiction writers, 21st-century American non-fiction writers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Maria Polinsky outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Maria Polinsky in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Maria Polinsky means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Maria Polinsky out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Maria Polinsky in simple terms?

Maria “Masha” Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages. Education and early life Polinsky was born in Moscow, Russia.

Why does Maria Polinsky matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Maria Polinsky?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Maria Polinsky.