Doris Payne

Professor of Linguistics

Ph.D., UCLA (1985)
Email: dlpayne@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Phone: (541) 346-3894
Office: 229 Straub Hall
Website: darkwing.uoregon.edu/~dlpayne/doris.htm

 

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Doris Payne's research has focused on morphology, syntax and semantics of little-studied languages, from typological, functional, and cognitive perspectives. A long-standing focus has been on word order, with a special attention to verb-initial languages and those where order of major consituents is primarily based on cognitive-pragmatic factors such as identifiability and contrastive focus. Additional research areas include syntactic argument structure and lexical semantics, the function of grammatical forms in discourse, "split syntax" (where part of a language's grammar has certain patterns or rules, but another has distinct patterns or rules), and sentence and discourse processing issues. Principal language areas have included (but are not limited to) South America and East Africa. Ongoing language documentation projects include descriptive grammars, and lexicography and text databases.