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David Embick

David Embick

· Professor Syntax, morphology, syntax/morphology interface, neurolinguistics

University of Pennsylvania · Linguistics

Active 1994–2025

h-index34
Citations9.4k
Papers809 last 5y
Funding$1.5M

Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.

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About

David Embick is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research areas include syntactic theory, morphological theory with a focus on Distributed Morphology, the interface between syntax and morphology, syntax and phonological form, event and argument structure, and lexical knowledge. Additionally, his research interests extend to language and the brain, including studies involving magnetoencephalography (MEG) and investigations into language and autism. Professor Embick is affiliated with the Experimental Morphology Laboratory (XMorph) and contributes to advancing understanding in these interconnected fields of linguistics.

Research topics

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Linguistics
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
  • Mathematics
  • Biology
  • Cognitive science
  • Pure mathematics

Selected publications

  • The Motivation for Roots in Distributed Morphology

    Annual Review of Linguistics · 2020 · 55 citations

    1st authorCorresponding

    Within Distributed Morphology, it has been proposed that the lexical vocabulary consists of Roots: category-less primitives. The motivation for Roots is connected with a line of argument reaching back to Chomsky's “Remarks on Nominalization” concerning the representation of lexical categories and their role in syntax. At the center of the theory of Roots is the Two Domains Intuition: the idea that there are two different types of domains in which grammatical interactions (form: allomorphy; meani…

    DOI

  • Dialect experience modulates cue reliance in sociolinguistic convergence

    Glossa Psycholinguistics · 2023-11-06 · 9 citations

    articleOpen access

    Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than observe from their interlocutor. In Wade (2022), participants produced more monophthongal /aI/—a salient feature of Southern U.S. English—after hearing other Southern-accented features. Here, by decoupling acoustic and social information with a dialect-label manipulation task, we investigate what types of cognitive associations account for this behavior: indirect socially-me…

    PublisherOA PDFDOI

  • On the Event-Structural Properties of the English<i>Get</i>-Passive

    Linguistic Inquiry · 2020 · 9 citations

    Senior authorCorresponding

    An important discussion in theories of argument structure concerns the explanatory division of labor between thematic properties and event structure. English get-passives, analyzed in much previous work as differing thematically from be-passives, provide an interesting test case. We present an analysis of get-passives centered on the proposal that they contain additional event structure (realized as get) relative to their be counterparts. We employ by-adjuncts to identify the different event str…

    DOI

  • Morphology and The Mental Lexicon

    Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-02-14 · 8 citations

    book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

    Abstract This chapter looks at the most basic question for the study of morphology and the mental lexicon: whether or not words are decomposed into constituent parts. Theories of the mental lexicon range from those that generalize decomposition as much as possible to those that posit no internal structure for words; various intermediate positions are also found. The key question at the center of this overview is what it means for a word to be decomposed in the first place; as it turns out, this…

    PublisherDOI

  • Retrieving stem meanings in opaque words during auditory lexical processing

    Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2021-04-07 · 4 citations

    articleOpen accessSenior author

    Recent constituent priming experiments show that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem, regardless of semantic transparency (e.g. Smolka et al. [(2014). ‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. <i>Journal of Memory and Language</i>, <i>72</i>, 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.12.002]). We examine whether the processing of opaque verbs (e.g. <i>herhal…

    PublisherOA PDFDOI

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Education

  • Ph.D., Syntax, morphology, syntax/morphology interface, neurolinguistics

    Univ. of Pennsylvania

    1997

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