Sophia Alexandra Malamud

Sophia Malamud is a theoretical linguist, specialising in the study of language meaning. This includes research in formal semantics, formal pragmatics, discourse functions of syntax, and semantics-pragmatics interface. In her publications, Sophia has explored a wide variety of topics in semantics and pragmatics, such as the relationship between discourse coherence and word order in Russian, relationship between indexicality, context-dependence and reference de se, indexical-like readings of impersonal pronouns, influence of passives and impersonals on subsequent discourse, semantics of plurals, and pragmatics and semantics of speech acts and utterance modifiers in English, Russian, Mandarin, and Heritage Russian. Her mathematics masters thesis explores several basic notions in statistical decision theory. In her current research, Sophia is expanding into the area of language acquisition and attrition, in particular, the study of heritage language knowledge. (Heritage speakers are those who start learning their first language, before becoming dominant in another language before they finished acquiring the first - a frequent situation in immigrant communities). Current projects include a study of utterance-final particle "ba" in Mandarin, of "won't you?" tags in American English, of requests, negation, passives and impersonals, and requests and other pragmatic phenomena in monolingual and bilingual Russian speech. Before coming to Brandeis, she has also taught mathematics (elementary-school level through Calculus III) at various venues.