Rebecca Shields

Language Sciences

Education

Ph.D. Linguistics, UW-Madison, 2009
M.A. Russian Philology, Moscow State University, 1999
B.A. Russian, Macalester College, 1996
Teastas i Múineadh na Gaeilge d’Fhoghlaimeoirí Fásta (Certificate in Teaching Irish to Adult Learners), Maynooth University, 2024

Research Statement

Rebecca’s research focuses on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. She has investigated the structure of modals, verb aspect, adverbs, definite noun phrases, and wh-questions. This research explores the interaction of syntactic locality constraints (Relativized Minimality, Intervention Effects, and Weak Crossover) with various types of semantically motivated movement (including wh-movement, scrambling, and topicalization). Her main languages of study have been English and Russian, and she has also written about other languages including Menominee and Japanese. An ongoing project is a cross-linguistic investigation of the syntax of Discourse-Linked (specific) nominals.

Irish Language Teaching and Revitalization

Rebecca is a speaker/learner of Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge), a heritage language in her family. She teaches non-credit community Irish language classes at UW-Madison, online with the Two Rivers Gaelic League in Albany, New York, with the local Madison community group Ciorcal Comhrá na Cuinge (The Isthmus Conversation Circle), and at occasional regional events such as the annual Tionól Gaeilge (Irish Language Gathering) at the UW-Milwaukee Center for Celtic Studies, and the Irish Language and Culture weekend in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is interested in the use of naturalistic corpora in language pedagogy and is engaged in several projects to create interactive online learning materials for adult learners of Irish.

Administrative Roles

As Instructional Administrator, Rebecca serves as Undergraduate Advisor for the Linguistics major, Curricular Representative for Linguistics courses, and manager of the Language Sciences website.

Teaching

Ling 101: Human Language
Anthro/Ling 301: Introduction to Linguistics
Ling 330: Syntax
Ling 340: Semantics
Ling 571: Structure of a Language – Irish

Rebecca also offers non-credit community language classes as a public outreach service:
Beginning Irish Gaelic 1 & 2

Selected Publications and Presentations

2022. The Ros na Rún corpus: Creating multimedia pedagogical materials for teaching Irish to adult learners. (Poster). 15^th Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC) Conference, University of Limerick, Ireland.

2012. Scrambling and the feature-based approach to Minimality. Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 19: The Maryland Meeting. Michigan Slavic Publications, pp. 85-98.

2012. (with Yafei Li and Vivian Lin) Adverb Classes and the Nature of Minimality. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30:1, 217-260.

2009. Intervention and Rescue: Arguments for Representational Constraints on Syntactic Dependencies. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

2008. The Functional Hierarchy in Menominee: Preverbs and Adverbs. CLS 41: The Main Session, Rodney L. Edwards, et al., eds., 431-444. Chicago: The Chicago Linguistic Society.

2006. Modal Repair. NELS 35: Proceedings of the 35^th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society. Leah Bateman and Cherlon Ussery, eds. Amherst, Mass.: GLSA.

2005. Menominee Preverbs as Functional Categories. Papers of the 36^th Algonquian Conference.

2004. Word Order and Discourse in Menominee. Papers of the 35^th Algonquian Conference, H. C. Wolfart, ed, 373-388. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba.