Home

Language Contact and Morphosyntax

I am a contact linguist and morphosyntactician specialized in Pidgin and Creole languages (and their source languages), and in theories of language emergence, language contact and change.

I have a particular interest in cognition and theoretical models of language contact & language emergence.  With collaborators, I use experimental methods (involving artificial language learning) investigating how languages and their speakers converge, diverge and innovate in multilingual settings.  I also use fieldwork data and tools from Generative Syntax to study the grammatical properties of Pidgins and Creoles.

My current research investigates the cognitive processes involved in contact situations and focuses on the role of convergence in L2 acquisition (Baptista, Gelman & Beck, 2016), bilingualism and creole genesis and development (Baptista, 2006; 2020).  

I direct the Cognition, Convergence and Language Emergence (CCLE) Research Group in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.  I am also core faculty in The Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science  and affiliated faculty in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.