Dr. Virginia Hill
Dr. Virginia Hill (formerly Motapanyane) is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. She received her MA from the University o
f Bucharest (in Classics). From the University of Geneva she received her second MA and her PhD in Linguistics (1991). She joined the Department of Humanities and Languages in 1990, and developed a Minor/Double Major in Linguistics program within the Department. In 2008 she was appointed as a Research Professor in the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics at Concordia University, and in 2012 she received a Leverhulme Trust Professorship at the University of Kent.
Dr. Hill specializes in formal syntax, with focus on Romance and Balkan languages. In this field she produced books and had numerous articles published in peer reviewed journals and collections of papers. Her research examines how pragmatic and discourse effects may arise from the application of syntactic rules and, ultimately, how such understanding may contribute to the study of language evolution in humans.
She has been a member of the international team working on biolinguistic issues under a $2.5 million Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), and hosted at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She also obtained SSHRCC Standard Research grants from which she created student jobs at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Dr. Hill served on the Executive committees of the Canadian Linguistics Association and the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association. She is presently the Editor of Linguistica Atlantica and a member of the editorial board for the publishing house of the University of Bucharest.
Books
- Di Sciullo, A.M. & V. Hill (eds). 2010. Interface properties: Edges, Heads and Projections. Amsterdam: JB.
- Motapanyane, V. (ed). 2000. Comparative studies in Romanian syntax. Oxford: Elsevier.
- Motapanyane, V. 1997. Acadian French. A Grammatical Sketch. München: Lincoln Europa. In collaboration with David Jory.
- Black, J. & V. Motapanyane (eds). 1997. Clitics, pronouns and movement. Amsterdam: JB.
- Black, J. & V. Motapanyane (eds). 1996. Micro-parametric syntax and dialect variation. Amsterdam: JB.
- Motapanyane, V. 1995. Theoretical Implications of Complementation in Romanian. Padova: Unipress.
Selected Articles
- Hill, V. to appear. The emergence of the Romanian subjunctive. The Linguistic Review.
- Hill, V. 2013. The direct object marker in Romanian: a historical perspective. Journal of Australian Linguistics (to appear).
- Hill, V. 2013. The emergency of the Romanian supine. Journal of Historical Linguistics 2 (to appear).
- Hill, V. Features and strategies: the internal syntax of vocative phrases. In Noel, P. & B. Sonnenhauser (eds). Vocatives! Addressing between system and performance. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 79-102.
- Alboiu, G. & V. Hill. 2012. The Case of A-bar ECM: Evidence from Romanian. In S. Keine & S. Sloggett (eds), Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the NELS. Amherst: GLSA Publisher (University of Massachusetts). 25-39.
- Alboiu, G. & V. Hill. 2012. Early Modern Romanian and Wackernagel's law. Suomen kielitieteellinen yhdistys (SKY) [Journal of the Linguistic Association of Finland] 25: 7-28.
- Hill, V. 2012. A main clause complementizer. In Aelbrecht, Lobke et al. (eds), Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons. 279-295. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Hill, V. 2012. Romanian 'can': change in parametric settings. In Galves, C. et al. (eds), Parameter Theory and Language Change. 264-279. Oxford: OUP.
- Hill, V. & O. Mladenova. 2011. Mapping the information structure in Early Modern Bulgarian clauses with the particle ta. Lingua 121 (15): 2103-2119.
- Pirvulescu, M. & V. Hill. 2011. Feature syncretism in the pragmatic field in L1 acquisition of French. Language Acquisition 19 (1): 73-81.
- Hill, V. 2011. Modal grammaticalization and the pragmatic field: a case study. Diachronica 28 (1): 25-53.
- Hill, V. & L. Tasmowski. 2008. Romanian Clitic Doubling: a view from pragmatics-semantics and diachrony. In Kallulli, Dalina and Liliane Tasmowski (eds.), Clitic Doubling in the Languages of the Balkan. 133-163. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Hill, V. 2008. Pragmatics markers as syntactic heads: a case study from Romanian. In Grohmann, Kleanthes and Phoevos Panagiotidis (eds.), Selected papers from the Syntaxfest Cyprus Conference. 237-265. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge University Scholars Press.
- Hill, V. 2007. Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field. The Linguistic Review 24 (1): 61-86.
- Hill, V. 2007. Vocatives and the Pragmatics-Syntax Interface. Lingua 117 (12): 2077-2105.,
