Welcome to Luke Adamson, who joins Rutgers Linguistics as a visiting lecturer. Get to know Luke a bit better with his self-introduction below:
Hi! My name is Luke Adamson, and I’m excited to be in the linguistics department at Rutgers as a visiting lecturer this year. I did my graduate studies at UPenn, and before this current position at Rutgers, I was an NSF-sponsored postdoc at Harvard.
My main research focus in recent years has been the morphosyntactic representation of grammatical gender: markedness relations among gender features, interpretation, and the syntactic locus of gender features. I’ve studied (and continue to study) gender from various angles: the notion of gender ‘defaults’; coordination resolution; locality in valuation; scope ambiguity; among others. I’m also more generally interested in modularity and how phi-features behave at the syntax/morphology interface, so I’ve worked on e.g. prenominal/postnominal agreement asymmetries in nominal coordination, number-based root suppletion, and the weird behaviors of exceptionally inflectionless elements like loanword adjectives.
In the fall semester, I’m teaching the two sections of the undergraduate syntax course, and in the spring, I’ll be teaching a graduate syntax seminar and the linguistics intro course. Beyond linguistics, I enjoy art music (broadly construed, not just what you’d consider classical music); my husband and I both play cello; I enjoy learning about topics like urban planning; and I take long walks pretty frequently.
I’m looking forward to getting to know people in the department and hearing about their research projects!
