Gabriella Hermon

Who is Gabriella Hermon?

Gabriella Hermon is one of the leading experts in the syntax of the Austronesian languages of Indonesia and Malaysia. She is especially well known for her work on voice and question formation in the Malay spoken in rural Sumatra, but an additional important contribution is her participation in a large scale study of language acquisition by children in Jakarta. This study documents how children acquire Indonesian, and is one of the few such studies of language acquisition in major Asian languages.

Professor Hermon received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois in 1981, and has taught at San Diego State University, the University of Illinois and the University of Delaware. She has published numerous articles in such major journals and Language, Linguistic Inquiry and Lingua.

Among Dr. Hermon's best known works are her 1985 book, "Syntactic Modularity", published by Foris; her 2002 article "The Typology of Wh-Movement, Wh-Questions in Malay" published in Syntax; her 1994 book "Language in the Andes", published by the Latin American Studies Program of the University of Delaware; and her 2008 article "Voice in Malay/Indonesian", published in Lingua.