Associate Professor & Head of Department

PhD (Leiden), MPhil (Tromsø), BJourn (Rhodes)

Email address: m.devos@ru.ac.za

I have diverse and active research interests.  I consider myself a syntactician with interests in general linguistics.  My interests include syntax and formal models in all languages, the linguistics and psycholinguistics of literacy in Africa and African languages, syntactic linearization, English and Afrikaans grammar and syntax, Pseudo-coordination, adpositions, EPP, agreement phenomena etc.  I am also interested in the language of assessment in tertiary education etc.  Please look at my publications page as well as my students'  research topics below to deduce the kinds of things I am interested in.

• Link to publications
• Link to General Interests
• Link to a perspective on Grahamstown for new arrivals and intrepid travellers
• Link to Normalization grammar
• Link to RU Open Source Syntax Module

Some of my current and past students' thesis topics

I am willing to supervise a wide range of linguistic and applied linguistic topics. Here are some ideas from previous students and projects.

Syntax and formal models

• Existential constructions in Western Armenian 
• Subject-Predicate Agreement and Coordination in Bantu Languages: An Optimality Theoretic Perspective 
• Agreement patterns with coordinated adjectives in SeSotho 
• Agreement patterns with coordinated verbs in Sesotho, isiXhosa, Xitsonga
• Object agreement patterns in isiXhosa
• A comparative study of Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Mandarin and isiXhosa 
• Tense and aspect in isiXhosa 
• Case Assignment in Arabic
• Coordinated infinitives in Swahili
• IPP and Participles in Afrikaans

Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to literacy

• Phonological awareness in isiXhosa 
• Morphological awareness in isiXhosa 
• Interactions of word length and syllable structure in isiXhosa literacy 
• Effective materials development and pedagogic practice in reading literacy in Nguni languages: a phonic-syllabic and morphosyntactic analysis
• Early Literacy through Technology: An Evaluation of a Tablet-based Experimental Approach to Literacy Acquisition
• Setswana dialects and their impact on Phonological Awareness

Modules taught:

• Linguistics 1 Language Structures
• Linguistics 2 Syntax
• Linguistics 2 Linguistics and Community
• Linguistics 3 Syntax
• Postgraduate: Language and Mind and Biolinguistics: Introduction to MinimalistSyntax
• Postgraduate: Language change and historical linguistics
• Postgraduate: The (psycho)linguistics of literacy in South Africa

Last Modified: Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:18:49 SAST