Maria Luisa Zubizarreta


Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California.

Education and personal life

Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Licence in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University in 1977. One year later she obtained her Maîtrise in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University. In 1982, she acquired her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. She held various academic positions before arriving at the University of Southern California, where she held a position from 1988 until her retirement.
She was married to fellow USC linguist, Jean-Roger Vergnaud.

Research

Zubizarreta has conducted her research within the framework of generative linguistics. More precisely, she is interested in linguistic theory as a model of mental competence and performance. Her approach is comparative and considers interface issues ranging from the relation between the lexicon and syntax to the prosody and syntax of focus.
Zubizarreta has conducted empirical research into issues dealing with second language acquisition, focusing on the mental grammar of the learners as they develop interlanguage. Her work has also explored person-related phenomena from a semantic perspective in different languages, including the use of person features in Paraguayan Guaraní.

Honors

A workshop, entitled Person and Perspective, and a related Festschrift were organized in her honor in 2019. The Festschrift, published by Cambridge University Press, is entitled Exploring Interfaces.

Selected publications