Faculty & Staff

Gary Milsark
Ph.D.

Ph.D. (linguistics) Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1974

M.A. (linguistics) Indiana University 1969

B.A. (linguistics and German) Indiana University 1968

Gary Milsark went to Indiana University as an undergraduate student in 1964 to study the cello with Janos Starker. This was a major mistake, but in some respects a fortunate one, since Indiana was at that time one of the very few universities in the United States that offered an undergraduate degree in linguistics, a field that captured his interest on first exposure. Indiana also gave him the opportunity to study Finnish and Estonian, languages that are very rarely taught in the U.S. even today, and to spend a year as an exchange student in the Seminar für vergleichende und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft at Universität Hamburg. After two years of a somewhat unsettled life that included a year studying psycholinguistics in the Communication Sciences Laboratory at the University of Florida, he entered the doctoral program in linguistics at M.I.T. There he was strongly influenced by Noam Chomsky and the other members of a uniquely talented and helpful faculty, and by a group of highly intelligent and argumentative fellow-students. He began teaching at Temple in 1974 and has done so ever since.

TEACHING AREAS

Undergraduate Courses:
CSD 1108 Introduction to Linguistics
CSD 2207 Phonetics
CSD 2208 Phonology
CSD 2217 Grammatical Description
CSD 2218 Language Processing
CSD 3301 Speech and Language Development
CSD 4397 Fieldwork in Linguistics

Graduate Courses:
CSD 5505 Issues in Linguistics
CSD 8601 Advanced Syntax

RESEARCH AREAS

Dr. Milsark’s interests lie in generative syntax and the interaction of syntax and semantics, with particular emphasis on English and other Germanic languages, and he works more or less in the “minimalist” framework of syntactic theory developed by Chomsky and others since the early 1990’s. He has also dabbled a toe from time to time in the study of adult language processing, although he has generally found the water a bit cold and withdrawn the toe quickly. He has written on existential constructions, gerundive nominalizations, case theory, and parsing, and he has pending projects on the properties of empty arguments and on constituent order in German.

Selected Publications:

Milsark, G., “Gerundive Nominalizations”, in Everaert and van Riemsdijk, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Blackwell Publishing Company, 2006

Reilly, J., C.H. Ramey, and G. Milsark, “Confounds in the Distinction between High and Low Imageability Words: Phonological, Etymological, and Morphological Differences,” Brain and Language 91, pp. 147-149, 2004.

Milsark, G. and Ding Xuan Li, "Arbitrary Reflexives in Chinese," in Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Linguistic Society, GLSA, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts,1990.

Milsark, G., "Singl-ing," Linguistic Inquiry 19, pp. 611-634, 1988

Milsark, G., "Case Theory and the Grammar of Finnish," in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Linguistic Society pp. 119 131, GLSA, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts,1985.
Milsark, G., "On Length and Structure in Sentence Parsing," Cognition 13, pp. 129 134, 1983.

Borden, G., A. Gerber, and G. Milsark, "Production and Perception of the /r/ /l/ Contrast in Korean Adults Learning English," Language Learning 33, pp. 499 526, 1983.

Milsark, G., Existential Sentences in English, Garland Publishing Company, New York, 1979.

Milsark, G., "Toward an Explanation of Certain Peculiarities of the Existential Construction in English," Linguistic Analysis 3, pp. 1 30, 1977. Reprinted in Javier Gutierrez-Rexach (ed.), Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. London/ New York: Routledge Publishing Co. 2003.

Milsark, G., "Re: Doubl ing," Linguistic Inquiry 3, pp. 542 549, 1972.