About Me

About Me

Research interests

I am a syntactician and a semanticist. I am also a fieldworker. The big questions that interest me concern cross-linguistic variation: How much variation is there in syntax? How much is there in semantics? How can we tell syntactic and semantic variation apart?

My research on these questions largely draws from findings in the syntax and semantics of Nez Perce, a Sahaptian language of the Columbia River Plateau. Some of the particular topics I have worked on recently are

• indexical shift
• attitude reports de re
• the person-case constraint (PCC)
• the mass/count distinction
• modals
• (hyper)raising to object
• first-person logophoricity (indexiphoricity)
• ergativity, including split ergativity and syntactic ergativity
• (complementizer) agreement and the operation Agree
• possession and possessor raising
• relative clauses
• outward-looking phonologically conditioned allomorphy
• how we reason about the raw data of fieldwork

You can find papers on these and other topics over on the papers page.

Academic history

I am currently associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, and affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. Before coming to Berkeley in 2015, I held tenure-track positions at UC Santa Cruz and at Harvard; before that, I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My dissertation was co-advised by Angelika Kratzer and Rajesh Bhatt. You can read about the Kratzer side of the academic genealogy here and here, thanks to Kai von Fintel. My academic ancestors on the Bhatt side can be found here.

Before that, I was an undergrad at Brandeis University, where I majored in linguistics and in philosophy. And still further back, I grew up in Fairfax County, VA, where I attended TJHSST (motto "today is tomorrow'').

Contact information

Dwinelle 1223, UC Berkeley, Berkeley CA 94720

ardeal@berkeley.edu

My name

If we're on a first-name basis, please call me "Amy Rose." Relatedly, my name is alphabetized like this:

Deal, Amy Rose

This website

This site is based on a free CSS template called "Box" by Ahmed Eissa. Most of the photos were taken by me, at sites including the SF Botanical Garden, the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, Red Fire Farm (Granby, MA), and the inner depths of Widener Library.