Nora Boneh (PhD 2003, Université Paris 8, Saint Denis) joined the Linguistics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007, after being a research and teaching associate at the universities of Paris 7, Denis Diderot and Paris 8, Saint Denis. Her research topics include the study of the linguistic manifestation of conceptual categories such as temporality, possession, and causation; within this exploration, particular attention is given to complex verb constructions, mainly from a syntactic synchronic perspective, but also from a historical one. She has mostly worked on the expression of habituality, on the aspectual properties of the Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew verbal systems, and their stability over time, on argument realization and the syntax of ditransitive verbs and datival arguments, and on causative constructions. Her linguistic analyses are carried out in semi-typological perspective applied to languages such as Hebrew, dialectal Arabic, French, English and Russian.
My work is mainly descriptive and comparative, covering various phases and registers of several languages—Akkadian, Neo-Aramaic, Biblical and modern Hebrew, as well as various aspects of comparative linguistics of Semitic. The domains covered in my work are syntax and macro-syntax, including such topics as information structure, the functional analysis of verbal systems (tense, aspect and modality, as well as its functions in narrative), the structure of narrative, conditional structures, relative clauses, and more. It always has to do with the interrelationships between the discursive/pragmatic background as well as syntactic environment on the one hand, and the function of the form itself (whether simple or complex) on the other. Currently I am working on a syntactic description of Old Babylonian Akkadian, funded by a grant from the ISF and on several additional topics—interrogative markers in Semitic, the diachrony of epistemic particles from a comparative perspective, genitive constructions in Semitic and conditional constructions in Semitic.
Luka Crnič received his PhD from MIT in 2011. His primary research interests lie in syntax, semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. His current grants are:
ISF 1926/14 Polarity items across languages
GIF I-2353-110.4/2014 Alternative-sensitive computations in natural language: focus-sensitive particles and embedded exhaustification
Eitan Grossman’s research revolves around the questions why are languages the way they are, and how do they become that way? He is interested in empirical approaches to explanations for linguistic diversity, and conducts research in the framework that has come to be called Distributional Typology, which asks "what's where why (when)?" Ongoing projects include:
The World Survey of Phonological Segment Borrowing (SEGBO), which explores the typology of phonological segment borrowing and its relevance for evaluating the Uniformitarian Hypothesis;
BDPROTO, a database of ancient and reconstructed sound systems;
The areal typology of sound change; and
The typology of contact-induced change in a few domains of grammar and lexicon, including valency and transitivity patterns, case markers and adpositions, and verb alternations.
He also works on (or has worked on) the description of Ancient Egyptian-Coptic, Nuer, Spanish, Minangkabau, and Modern Hebrew.
Dr. Maayan Keshev studies the psycholinguistic process of sentence processing. She is interested in the memory mechanisms that support our ability to understand language, and the ways in which people use grammatical knowledge while sentences unfold word by word. Her work is based on controlled experiments, and uses various methods testing acceptability judgments, interpretation, response times, and eye-movements. This research occasionally also features computational cognitive models.
Dr. Maayan Keshev received her PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2021, then moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to conduct her postdoctoral research, before joining our department in 2023.
My research revolves around the question how language is used in different discursive contexts and how these uses shape the structure of language. I study Semitic languages, specifically Classical Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Modern Hebrew, and Neo Aramaic. The topics on which I conducted research include: tense-usage in different discourse environments, clause combining, presentatives, expressive structures, narrative structure, discourse markers, digital genre analysis, spoken and written discourse, and language contact (Arabic and Hebrew). My present research project, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, focuses on discourse markers in conversational and written Egyptian Arabic. In addition, I am a member of a network of interactional linguists studying responsive particles in conversation. Another field which I study is emergent practices in interactional digital discourse (e.g., in WhatsApp).
Malka Rappaport Hovav graduated from MIT in 1984 with a thesis on phonological and morphological aspects of Tiberian Hebrew. She was associated with the Lexicon Project at the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT in the years 1984 – 1987. She taught linguistics in the English department at Bar Ilan from 1984 – 1999, when she moved to HU. She is a founding member of the Language, Logic and Cognition Center. Her work focuses on lexical semantics and its interface with morphosyntax and conceptual categories, with papers published on nominalizations, adjectival passives, lexical aspect, diathesis alternations such as the causative alternation and the dative alternation and conceptual categories such as manner and result. She is author with Beth Levin of Unaccusativity (MIT Press, 1995) and Argument Realization (CUP, 2005) and editor, with Edit Doron and Ivy Sichel of Syntax, Lexical Semantics and Event Structure (OUP 2010).
Aynat Rubinstein studies semantics of natural of language and its interfaces with pragmatics and syntax. She is interested in the linguistic mechanisms that underlie the uniquely human ability to speak not just of the "here and now" but also to describe thoughts about the past, the future, what is possible or necessary, and what may have happened but did not come to pass. In her work, she makes use of empirical research methods including mining of large corpora (corpus linguistics), natural language processing (computational algorithms), and psycholinguistic experiments. Using corpus methods and Large Language Models, she studies the emergence of modern Hebrew around the turn of the 20th century.
Diane Brentari joined the department at Hebrew University in 2019 as Distinguished Visiting Professor, and is also the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Center for Gesture Sign and Language at the University of Chicago.
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (PhD 2009, Harvard University), Joined the faculty of the department of Hebrew Language at Hebrew University in 2010 after being the lecturer in Semitics at Yale University.
His areas of research: The history of the Semitic Languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian), Historical linguistics, formal semantics and typology. He also studies the history of the linguistic discipline using methodologies from the field of philosophy of sciences.
In recent years he mostly works on reciprocal constructions, causative constructions and constructions with non-argument datives, both from the semantic and the historical point of views. He also publishes in fields related to rabbinic literature and Jewish Studies more broadly.
Elitzur was a visiting professor at Harvard University and Yale University.
Diane Brentari joined the department at Hebrew University in 2019 as Distinguished Visiting Professor, and is also the Mary K. Werkman Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Center for Gesture Sign and Language at the University of Chicago.
Her research addresses the extent to which the modality of a language—auditory, visual, or tactile—has an effect on language structure, on variation among languages, and on the flexibility of the human language capacity. This work focuses primarily on sign language grammars, particularly problems at the intersection of morphology, phonology, and prosody. She has written two books, edited five volumes, and published over 100 articles or book chapters, on these and other themes.
Her research has expanded to include language emergence. Her current projects include analyses of the emergence of sign languages, as well as a new protactile language that is emerging in DeafBlind communities in the USA, which uses the modalities of proprioception and touch. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship (2020-2021) and by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation of the United States (2001- present). Brentari is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nora Boneh (PhD 2003, Université Paris 8, Saint Denis) joined the Linguistics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007, after being a research and teaching associate at the universities of Paris 7, Denis Diderot and Paris 8, Saint Denis. Her research topics include the study of the linguistic manifestation of conceptual categories such as temporality, possession, and causation; within this exploration, particular attention is given to complex verb constructions, mainly from a syntactic synchronic perspective, but also from a historical one. She has mostly worked on the expression of habituality, on the aspectual properties of the Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew verbal systems, and their stability over time, on argument realization and the syntax of ditransitive verbs and datival arguments, and on causative constructions. Her linguistic analyses are carried out in semi-typological perspective applied to languages such as Hebrew, dialectal Arabic, French, English and Russian.
My work is mainly descriptive and comparative, covering various phases and registers of several languages—Akkadian, Neo-Aramaic, Biblical and modern Hebrew, as well as various aspects of comparative linguistics of Semitic. The domains covered in my work are syntax and macro-syntax, including such topics as information structure, the functional analysis of verbal systems (tense, aspect and modality, as well as its functions in narrative), the structure of narrative, conditional structures, relative clauses, and more. It always has to do with the interrelationships between the discursive/pragmatic background as well as syntactic environment on the one hand, and the function of the form itself (whether simple or complex) on the other. Currently I am working on a syntactic description of Old Babylonian Akkadian, funded by a grant from the ISF and on several additional topics—interrogative markers in Semitic, the diachrony of epistemic particles from a comparative perspective, genitive constructions in Semitic and conditional constructions in Semitic.
Luka Crnič received his PhD from MIT in 2011. His primary research interests lie in syntax, semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. His current grants are:
ISF 1926/14 Polarity items across languages
GIF I-2353-110.4/2014 Alternative-sensitive computations in natural language: focus-sensitive particles and embedded exhaustification
Eitan Grossman’s research revolves around the questions why are languages the way they are, and how do they become that way? He is interested in empirical approaches to explanations for linguistic diversity, and conducts research in the framework that has come to be called Distributional Typology, which asks "what's where why (when)?" Ongoing projects include:
The World Survey of Phonological Segment Borrowing (SEGBO), which explores the typology of phonological segment borrowing and its relevance for evaluating the Uniformitarian Hypothesis;
BDPROTO, a database of ancient and reconstructed sound systems;
The areal typology of sound change; and
The typology of contact-induced change in a few domains of grammar and lexicon, including valency and transitivity patterns, case markers and adpositions, and verb alternations.
He also works on (or has worked on) the description of Ancient Egyptian-Coptic, Nuer, Spanish, Minangkabau, and Modern Hebrew.
Edit Doron's research concerns the interface of semantics, morphology and syntax, particularly such topics as the Semitic verbal system, nominal predicates, the subject-predicate relation, resumptive pronouns, ergativity, ellipsis, free indirect discourse, habituality, the semantics of voice, definiteness, and reference to kinds. The main languages she has worked on are Hebrew (with special emphasis on the historical ties of Modern Hebrew to Classical Hebrew), Arabic, Aramaic, English and French.
Born 1930, Tel Aviv; Ph.D. 1967, Hebrew University; (Tel Aviv Univ., 1965-1985); Prof. (HU) 1985; Emeritus 1998; Recipient, Israel Prize for Language Sciences, 1993; Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, since 1996; Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, since 1999. Died 2013.
Research interests included comparative Semitic linguistics, linguistic typology, the history of linguistics thought, the grammatical traditions of Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic and Hebrew as well as European traditions. In addition, he was a prominent expert in the Semitic languages and of Syriac.
Born 1932, Krakow; Ph.D. 1969, Hebrew University; Lecturer 1970; Senior Lecturer 1972; Associate Professor 1981; Professor 1985; Emerita 1994; Recipient of the Israel Prize in General Linguistics 2005. Research interests include Semitic languages, especially Ethio-Semitic and Neo-Aramaic, as well as synchronic and diachronic syntax and language interference.
Born 1930, Tel Aviv; Ph.D. 1985, Hebrew University; Research Fellow 1986; Associate Professor 1992; Emeritus 1996. Died in 2014.
Research interests included comparative ancient Indo-European, especially Indo-Iranian; Indo-European etymology; a renowned expert of Vedic, especially the Rgveda;Indo-European poetic language; parallels and possible contacts between ancient Indo-European and ancient Semitic poetry.
Anita was born in 1926 in Berlin; the family moved to England in 1939. She had a BA and MA in classics from University of London. Her MA was on the first book of Maccabees.She then worked in a bookstore, and taught Latin and classics in various highschools in England. She moved to Israel in 1963, where she began teaching English in the English department. She returned to English to be with her ailing mother in 1968 and then enrolled in the PhD program in Linguistics (though it looks like she also considered studying psycholinguistics). Her PhD is from 1971. Her research interests included the semantics of temporal expressions: aspect, adverbials of duration and frequency, tense; the Davidsonian theory of events, specifically as it affects the interpretation of adverbials and cognate object and of bare infinitivals.
Born in New-York, 1958. Member of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics' and in the International Lexical-Functional Grammar Association. Professor of Linguistics at the English department since 1984, and then from 2008 at the Linguistics Department, Generative Track. Passed away in 2012.
Primary area of research interest is theoretical generative syntax with a typological orientation, in the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar; The nature of the basic elements of syntactic representation -- constituent structure and grammatical functions -- and the relation between them. Subjecthood, development of LFG analyses for various constructions in both English and Hebrew (auxiliaries, mixed categories, infinitives, etc.).
Ph.D.1978, Academy of Sciences, Institute of Linguistics, Leningrad, Russia. 1993 - 2015 : Researcher in the Department of Linguistics, The Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Lecturer 1993; Senior Lecturer; Associate Professor 2006.
Research interests include Germanistics (History and Dialectology of German; Phonology and Grammar of Germanic Languages (esp.: German Sprachinseln, Diachronic Phonology of German Dialects), Diachronic Linguistics, General Phonology (esp.: Structural Methods of Phonological Analysis; History of Structuralism), Languages in Contact (esp.: Code-Switching Models, Interference in Grammar and in Phonology, Russian Abroad, German Abroad; e.g., Russian in Israel, German in Russia), Folk Narratives (esp.: Linguistic Structures of Personal Narratives, Fairytales, and Charms), Poetics, Stylistics, Translation Theory, and Typology.
As a specialist in Spanish philology, Ibero-romance languages and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), her research and teaching focus on historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and language variation of Spanish and Judeo-Spanish. M.A. from the Freie Universität Berlin and PhD from the Hebrew University, she was a research fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) before she has joined the Department of Romance and Latin American Studies in 2009. Her current projects include the “Annotate diachronic corpus of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino)" and “Civic responses after terror attacks in Europe: linguistic issues”. She is corresponding academician of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE).
Dr. Mori Rimon is a part-time adjunct professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the interdisciplinary Language, Logic and Cognition Center (LLCC). Mori is also a self-employed hi-tech consultant in areas of his expertise. His background includes R&D activities in hi-tech/IT companies, most notably in managerial and technical positions in IBM Research. Mori holds a PhD in Computer Science, an MSc in Mathematics and a BSc in Mathematics and Physics, all from the Hebrew University. Professional interests and teaching areas include computational linguistics, text analytics / NLP, machine learning and knowledge management (aka "big data" these days).
Born 1945, Haifa; Ph.D. 1973, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Lecturer 1973; Senior Lecturer 1978; Associate Professor 1984; Professor 1987; Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests include Celtic grammar, especially the syntax of Irish and Modern and Middle Welsh, Egyptian and Coptic grammar, typological-comparative grammar, and text linguistics, especially narrative grammar.
Ivy Sichel's work focuses on syntactic theory in its relatively recent developments within the Minimalist Program, and more specifically the syntax-semantics interface. She is interested in the syntactic contribution to meaning in all its aspects and has worked on a variety of empirical domains with this broad question in mind. These domains include the event properties of nominalizations, the structural decomposition of the meaning of POSSESSION, the effect of structure and movement on the interpretation of negative expressions, the interpretation of resumptive pronouns and ordinary pronouns, the propensity of demonstrative pronouns for deictic use, and in the domain of locality, the factors which enter into allowing selective extraction from relative clauses in some languages. She is also interested in the Sociolinguistics of the revival of Hebrew speech, and has written about women’s contribution to the revival project at the turn of the 20th century (with Miri Bar-Ziv Levi), and about the relationship between the revival and the establishment of the State of Israel (with Uri Mor).
Professor in the Dept of Linguistics and the Dept of German, Russian and East European Studies. Tamara and Saveli Grinberg Chair in Russian Studies.
Research areas:
- Medieval East Slavic languages and literatures: Old Russian, Ruthenian (predecessor of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian), in particular the medieval translations from Hebrew into these languages. Slavonic Bible translations. Slavonic extra-canonical literature. The Old Russian Chronicles and Chronographs (universal historical compilations).
- Yiddish language and literature in all its aspects, in particular the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phraseology of the written language of the 19th-20th centuries, but also earlier stages. The historical development of the language, its dialects, and its recent impoverishment among the ultra-orthodox speakers in Israel and the US. The impact of the co-territorial languages (Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian) on the grammar and lexicon of Yiddish, and nowadays the impact of Modern Hebrew and English on the new spoken and written varieties of Yiddish, as well as the impact of Yiddish and Slavic on the syntax of Modern Hebrew.
My research revolves around capturing, describing, and explaining linguistic diversity. I am interested in the linguistic variation found in the languages of the world and approaches to explaining this variation. The phenomena I study primarily come from the domain of morpho-syntax and include grammatical relations, information structure, and clause linkage. In addition, I have been collaborating in projects on phonetics, conversation analysis, and psycholinguistics. In my research, I combine large-scale typological studies involving several hundreds languages with studies of the phenomena of interest in single language families (micro-typology), as well as with in-depth studies on individual languages. I am also actively involved in language documentation and description and conducted multiple fieldtrips collecting primary data on the Khoisan languages Khoekhoe (Khoe-Kwadi) and Nǁng (or Nǀuu, ǃUi-Taa) spoken in South Africa. At the moment, I am working on the previously undescribed Bantu language Ruuli spoken in Uganda.
Yael Ziv's primary research areas are discourse/pragmatics, with specific interests in relevance theory, the syntax-pragmatics interface, information structure, discourse markers and reference/anaphora.
Dikla Abarbanel is a graduate student in the department of linguistics. Main interests are the syntax–semantics interface in Modern Hebrew. Her Thesis paper, under the supervision of Dr. Nora Boneh, deals with the aspectual role and other functions of two common verbs of motion in coordinated and subordinated verb phrases. Received a scholarship from the HU University in 2015.
Omri Mayraz is an MA student of linguistics in the joint direct PhD program of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and a memeber of the "Historical Linguistics and Formal Semantics" research group at Scholion Center. He studies phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface from a typological and diachornic perspective. A HUJI-TAU and Scholion scholar.
B.A. in Romance languages, currently a M.A. student at the department of Linguistics and about to finish his first M.A. in Spanish Literature (Mandel M.A. honors program).Interested in Romance Languages especially Ibero-Romance varieties, Historical Linguistics, Morphophonology, Morphopragmatics, Dialectology and Sociolinguistics.
Bar Avineri is a PhD student in Linguistics, under the supervision of Dr. Nora Boneh and Dr. Olga Kagan.
She focuses on mood and modality phenomena in Modern Hebrew, paying attention to issues around language change and language contact. She is a member of the EMODHEBREW project, studying the emergence of Modern Hebrew syntax.
Her MA thesis, supervised by Prof. Edit Doron and Dr. Aynat Rubinstein, deals with morphosyntactic and semantic regularities of sensory perception verbs in Modern Hebrew.
Moshe E. Bar-Lev is a postdoc at the Language, Logic and Cognition Center (LLCC) whose work concerns the Semantics and Pragmatics of Natural Language, with particular interest in the semantics of plurality and tense and in exhaustivity phenomena. His dissertation, "Free Choice, Homogeneity, and Innocent Inclusion" (HUJI 2018) was supervised by Dr. Luka Crnič and Prof. Danny Fox.
Assaf Bar-Moshe is a Ph.D. candidate of the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Arabic Language and Literature under the supervision of Prof. Eran Cohen and Prof. Simon Hopkins. His main area of interest is the Arabic dialect of the Jews in Baghdad and he writes his dissertation about the tense-aspect-modality system of the dialect. His master thesis focused on demonstratives and third person pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. In addition, Assaf is interested in description of spoken languages and historical linguistics. Assaf was awarded a scholarship on behalf of the German DAAD for a two years' stay (2015-2015) in the Department of Semitic Studies in Heidelberg University.
Meira Ben Dov is a graduate student in functional linguistics, with focus on discourse and pragmatics and their interface with psychology and sociology.
Ido Benbaji is an M.A. student in linguistics in the joint graduate program in linguistics of the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. He is interested in semantics, its interface with syntax and in issues in the philosophy of language, among them the semantic contribution of singular terms and the meaning of a variety of attitude verbs.
Asael Benyami is an M.A student in the Department of Linguistics and holds a B.A degree in Functional Linguistics and Asian Studies (magna cum laude). He was also a member of the Middle Persian Dictionary Project directed by Prof. Shaul Shaked. His main areas of interest include the Persian language and other Iranian languages of all periods, as well as information structure, descriptive grammar, and discourse analysis.
B.A. in linguistics and history, currently an M.A. student in the linguistics department. The main areas of interest include Germanic, Slavic and Roman languages, as well as typology, morphology and semantics.
Rammie Cahlon is a PhD candidate enrolled in a joint program with Leiden University (Supervised by Prof. W.F.H Adelaar and Dr. Eitan Grossman). His research focuses on linguistic diversity and language chang and his doctorate research, titled "linguistic diversity: a Quechuan case-study", deals with the role of variance in the stabilization process of unstable features. His research interests include areal typology, language typology, language change pathways, transitivity and argument structure, Creoles, Andean and Scandinavian languages. Rammie Cahlon is a fellow at the Mandel School PhD honors program.
Nofar Cohen is a graduate student in the linguistics department. Her interests include syntax-semantics interface, psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics. She is currently working as lab manager for the HUJI Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab, under the supervision of Dr. Luka Crnič.
Gili Diamant is completing her PhD in linguistics under the joint supervision of Dr. Lea Sawicki of the Linguistics department at the Hebrew University and Dr. Jeffrey L. Kallen of Trinity College Dublin. Her work focuses on the description of Irish English grammar in the context of traditional Irish society and folklore. Her main interests lie in the study of varieties of English as well as the Celtic languages, and she is also interested in syntax, historical linguistics, text linguistics, and in various aspects of the representation of spoken language in writing. Gili has spent the academic year 2014-2015 as an Erasmus Mundus visiting scholar in University College Dublin, Ireland.
Omri Doron is an M.A. student in Linguistics in the LLCC. Interested in semantics and syntax, and their connection to philosophy of language and to cognition and information theories.
Amir Efrati is a M.A student in the functional linguistics department and in the LLCC. Has a B.A. in functional linguistics and in the cognitive sciences.
He is a lab assistant in the Language Learning and Processing Lab under Prof. Inbal Arnon. His areas of interest include language acquisition, discourse analysis and psycholinguistics.
Elad Eisen is a graduate student in an individual program under the supervision of Dr. Eitan Grossman, writing his thesis on typology of borrowed sounds. Main areas of interest include Semitic languages in general and dialects of Neo-Aramaic in particular, as well as typology, historical linguistics and applications of corpus linguistics. Awards and prizes: the Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies excellence prize (2016-2017), Rector's List for academic achievements (2016), Rector's Award for academic achievements (2014) and an excellence prize awarded by the Department of Hebrew Language (2014).
Benjamin Freidenberg is a film director who graduated with honors from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School Jerusalem. Parallel with his work in the film industry, he studied linguistics for a bachelor's degree and is currently completing his master's degree. Supervised by Dr. Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, his research focuses on the linkage between historical linguistics and the development of the filmic craft, specifically targeting the syntax and semantics of film. This interdisciplinary study which engages linguistics and cinema studies, involves semantic changes of verbs indicating object movement ('to give', 'to deliver', 'to retreat', 'to approach', etc.) and compares it with historical changes in the meaning of camera movement in films. Among his research interests: historical syntax, aesthetics, metaphor and metonymy, visual vs. textual aspects of Egyptian hieroglyphs and history of the arts.
Member of the Israel Film Academy and contributor to film preservation projects at the Israel Film Archive in the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the Judaica Division Images Collections of Harvard University. Recipient of the America-Israel scholarships for outstanding artists and the International Association of Film & Television Schools' prize for outstanding filmmakers and scholars.
Yael Gaulan is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department. Under the supervision of Dr. Michal Marmorstein and Prof. Zohar Kampf from the Department of Communication and Journalism she studies the concept of shame and the emotions linked to it in personal and public discourse. She also works in the field of Hebrew language pedagogy in various political contexts.
Her M.A. thesis, under Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal's supervision, dealt with semantic and syntactic phenomena regarding causative psych-verbs in Hebrew.
Awards and prizes include the Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies excellence prize (2012, 2014) and the Kutscher prize for excellent academic achievements, the Department of Hebrew Language (2013).
I am a graduate student in the Functional Linguistics department, co-supervised by Dr. Eitan Grossman and Prof. Hans Boas from the University of Austin, TX. I am focusing on Typology of German speech islands - a group of languages spoken outside the German sphere, which exist in constant and influential contact with their surrounding languages.
Dana is currently pursuing her M.A. in Linguistics and is a participant in the Language Logic and Cognition Center (LLCC). She holds a B.A in English Literature from Binghamton University where she minored in Linguistics. Interests include semantics and pragmatics and how they intersect with philosophy and psychology. She is particularly interested in applying computational methods to her research.
Jeremy Grynpas is a Masters Student at the Hebrew University. His background in linguistics includes a Bachelor's Degree in Linguistics and Russian Studies from the University of Edinburgh as well as experience in the phonetics lab at the Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences Department at UCL. At UCL, Jeremy was proud to have contributed to a speech perception study that resulted in two publications (see below). Over the past two years at the Hebrew University, Jeremy has focused on Russian from a diachronic (OCS and Old Russian) and synchronic perspective, aspect and aktionsart, and research methods in corpus linguistics. He is currently working on his masters thesis on the semantic profile of Russian verbal prefixes from a dichronic perspective under the guidance of Drs. Aynat Rubinstein and Olga Kagan.
Yair Itzhaki is a graduate student in the Linguistics Department. His main interests are Formal Semantics and Syntax-Semantics interface, focusing on Vagueness, Negation, Ellipsis and Demonstratives. He is currently conducting work as part of Ivy Sichel’s ISF funded project on Demonstratives, deixis and anaphora.
Einat Keren is a PhD student in the department of Generative Linguistics, under the supervision of Dr. Ivy Sichel. She is interested in negativity-sensitive quantifiers (N-Words and NPIs), presuppositions and implicatures, and also Creole languages and their connection to the revival process of Hebrew. She is a member of “The emergence of Modern Hebrew” research group at the Mandel Scholion Center, 2013-2016. Her Masters' Thesis won an excellence prize.
BA in Linguistics and Hebrew from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2014). Eliana is a second year MA student in the Department of Linguistics, was awarded the 2016 Rector's Award for academic achievements, and is a student in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel MA Honors Program. She is a member of the Middle Persian Dictionary Project directed by Prof. Shaul Shaked under the auspices of the Israel Science Foundation, and is working on Middle Persian valency patterns. Main areas of interest include Iranian languages of all periods, as well as alignment, transitivity and information structure.
Anna Kostina is a PhD student in the Linguistics Department. Her current research, supervised by Prof. Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, focuses on the main features of register usage in the speech of ‘second generation’ in Israel, i.e. those people who were born or grew up in Israel, from bilingual (Russian-Hebrew/English-Hebrew) families. Her areas of interest include sociolinguistics, language acquisition and pragmatics. A Klausner Foundation scholar in 2017-2018.
Christian Locatell (PhD, Ancient Languages, Stellenbosch University) is a postdoctoral fellow working at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and ancient languages, especially Ancient Hebrew and other Northwest Semitic languages. His current work focuses on the way that adverbial conjunctions developed in ancient northwest Semitic (i.e. what did they develop from, what did they develop into, and how did they acquire new meanings and functions). Other interests include verbal systems, information structure and discourse analysis, grammaticalization theory, cognitive linguistics, neural theories of language, translation, hermeneutics, archaeology, theology, and anything that can help better understand ancient texts and their worlds.
Elena Luchina-Sadan is a PhD candidate, supervised by Prof. Moshe Taube and Dr. Eitan Grossman. Her research focuses on Yiddish zikh-verbs, i.e., verbs that occur with the particle zikh “self,” which are sometimes called 'reflexive verbs, in areal context. Her research interests include Jewish languages, heritage languages and language change.
Anat Malul is an M.A student in the generative linguistics department and a participant in the Huji-Tau program, a collaboration between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv University. Anat is interested in Romance languages, in particular Judeo-Español, as well as in language acquisition. She won the National Authority of Ladino prize in 2015.
Nadia Masarwa is an M.A. student in the generative track. She is interested in semantics and syntax. Currently, she is a research assistant for Dr. Nora Boneh regarding rising and control sentences in Arabic. In addition, she is teaching strengthening courses for Arab students in the Linguistics departmen
Nadav Matalon is a member of the PhD honors program at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. His study is supervised by Dr. Michal Marmorstein, Prof. Elisha Moses (The Weizmann Institute of Science) and Prof. Dagmar Barth-Weingarten (University of Potsdam, Germany). Nadav studies prosody in everyday talk of Hebrew and English. He holds a B.Mus from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and a M.A. with honors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His M.A. thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Michal Marmorstein and Dr. Eitan Grossman, provides a formal and functional analysis of the "camel humps prosodic pattern” - a common prosodic pattern in Israeli Hebrew.
Ioram Melcer is a doctoral student at the Department of Linguistics, under the supervision of Prof. Cyril Aslanov. His research is focused on the Zero Article in Brazilian Portuguese. He is interested in Spanish and dialects of Spanish in Latin America, in nominalizations and the syntax of the proper name. He is the winner of several awards for his literary work as well as for his work as a translator. Author of 5 books and translator of more than 90 books from Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan and English. Is currently engaged in the translation of the Purgatorio, the second part of the Divina Commedia, under the supervision of Prof. Luisa Ferretti-Cuomo.
A second-degree student in the department of functional linguistics. Graduated first degree in oriental studies, his main interests are descriptive, comparative and historical aspects of the Afro-Asian languages in general and the Semitic languages in particular.
Naomi Rachman is a graduate student in functional linguistics, under the supervision of Prof. Orly Goldwasser. Main areas of interest include Middle and Late Egyptian and Akkadian, as well as Historical linguistics, Afro-Asiatic linguistics the Egyptian classifier system and the Semitic root.
Hagay Schurr is a graduate student in linguistics, awarded a full scholarship in the honors program of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (2014-2016). His research interests revolve around linguistic diversity and language variation and change. His current projects concern morpho-syntactic phenomena in Romance languages, set on the background of linguistic typology in general. His MA dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Eitan Grossman is titled Differential Argument Coding in Romance: Towards a revised typology. This project tackles questions of variation and change in nominal and pronominal argument structure from two perspectives: the family-level syntactic typology, including minority and substandard languages, and a usage-based study in French and Spanish, based on diachronic corpora. More generally, he is also interested in grammaticalization and contact-induced change cross-linguistically.
Uriel Segal is a graduate student in generative linguistics department. Works in the field of semantics and pragmatics, and his thesis deals with implementation of modes of pragmatic inferences (such as implicature or ïts traditional name “Diyuk”=exaction) in the Babylonian Talmud, under the supervision Of Prof, Yael Ziv.
My research interests lie in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of conversational language, making use of discourse-functional approaches to the study of spoken language, as well as of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. My research focuses on spoken Israeli Hebrew, and includes the following topics: referential choice, negation, discourse markers, co-speech gestures, intensification, language change, copula.
Minjeung Ko is working towards her doctorate in the department of linguistics under the supervision of Prof. Eitan Grossman and Prof. Anton Antonov (from INALCO, France). She works on the dialect of defectors from North Korea.
Dr. Vera Agranovsky is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics, within the international research project Roots in Context: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation, under the supervision of Prof. Malka Rappaport Hovav. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled The Productive Mechanisms of Derivation in the Modern Hebrew Verbal System, was written at the Department of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, and was completed in 2025. Between 2017 and 2020, Vera was a member of the research group The Emergence of Modern Hebrew, founded by Prof. Idit Doron at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on morphological productivity in Modern Hebrew, at the interface with semantics and syntax, as well as on language change.
Asael Benyami is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics under the supervision of Prof. Eitan Grossman (HUJI) and Prof. Shahar Shirtz (ASU).
He holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in Functional Linguistics (magna cum laude). His M.A. thesis, supervised by Prof. Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Dr. Pegah Faghiri, is titled “Valency Classes and Alternations in Persian”. He was also a member of the Middle Persian Dictionary Project directed by Prof. Shaul Shaked.
His main research interests include the Persian language and other Iranian languages of all historical periods, as well as linguistic typology, valency, and descriptive grammar.
Minjeung Ko is working towards her doctorate in the department of linguistics under the supervision of Prof. Eitan Grossman and Prof. Anton Antonov (from INALCO, France). She works on the dialect of defectors from North Korea. Her Master’s degree thesis dealt with linguistics innovations in contemporary Korean. Since 2010, she has been teaching the Korean language at several universities across Israel, and in the 2025/2026 academic year, she teaches the course ‘Introduction to the Structure of the Korean Language’ at the Hebrew University. She has recently co-authored a chapter on Korean language instruction in Israel https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003536949-8.
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