Julie Anne Legate


Julie Anne Legate is a linguist who works in the areas of syntax and morphology. Her work investigates the structural representation of voice in syntax, beginning with a focus on Acehnese, a language spoken in Indonesia, but also including evidence from structures in Celtic, Scandinavian, and Slavic, broadening current cross-linguistic understanding of passive-like constructions.
Legate earned her B.A. from York University in 1995 and her M.A. from the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, writing a dissertation on the Warlpiri language, under the supervision of Noam Chomsky and Sabine Iatridou. She is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since 2015 Legate has been the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

Key publications

Articles and chapters

JA Legate and CD Yang. 2002. Empirical re-assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review.
JA Legate. 2003. Some interface properties of the phase. Linguistic Inquiry.
JA Legate. 2006. Split absolutive. Ergativity.
JA Legate and CD Yang. 2007. Morphosyntactic learning and the development of tense. Language Acquisition.
JA Legate. 2008. Morphological and abstract case. Linguistic Inquiry.
JA Legate. 2012. Subjects in Acehnese and the Nature of the Passive. Language.

Books

JA Legate. 2014. Voice and v: Lessons from Acehnese. MIT Press.