Judith Aissen

Judith Lillian Aissen (born 4 June 1948) is an American professor emerita in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Career Aissen began to study Mayan languages in 1972 as a graduate student at Harvard University, conducting field research in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. was published by Garland in 1979. as well as for her work on differential object marking. Since 1995, she has been making trips to Chiapas to teach workshops in syntax to linguistics students who are native Mayan language speakers.

Awards and distinctions On January 3, 2008, she became a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2011, Aissen's colleagues at University of California, Santa Cruz organized a festschrift in her honor, entitled Representing Language: Essays in Honor of Judith Aissen. In 2018, she was awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Kenneth L. Hale Award "for her energetic documentation of Tzotzil and other Mayan languages, her success at bringing these languages to bear on linguistic theory, and her commitment to the nurturing of Indigenous linguists."

Selected publications

Books Aissen, Judith. The syntax of causative constructions. Vol. 10. Garland Pub., 1979. Aissen, Judith. Tzotzil clause structure. Vol. 7. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.

Articles Aissen, Judith, and David M. Perlmutter. "Clause reduction in Spanish." Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Vol. 2. 1976. Aissen, Judith. "Topic and focus in Mayan." Language (1992): 43-80. Aissen, Judith. "On the syntax of obviation". Language. 73 (1997): 705–750. ISSN 1535-0665. doi:10.1353/lan.1997.0042 Aissen, Judith. "Markedness and subject choice in Optimality Theory." Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 17.4 (1999): 673-711. Aissen, Judith. "Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy." Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21.3 (2003): 435-483.