Barbara Citko has been awarded the Linguistics Department’s Howard and Frances Nostrand Endowed Professorship for 2023-2025. The endowed professorship was established in Linguistics 2004 by a $500,000 gift from Howard and Frances Nostrand, intended to promote language and culture as a new discipline, and to underscore the need for cultural competence. Prof. Nostrand chaired the UW Department of Romance Languages and Literature from 1939 to 1964, retiring from teaching in 1981.
Citko is the seventh professor in Linguistics to be selected Nostrand Endowed Professor. Previous recipients were Frederick Newmeyer, Alicia Beckford Wassink, Sharon Hargus, Ellen Kaisse, Edith Aldridge, and Emily M. Bender.
Citko’s research focuses on minimalist syntax, syntax-semantics interface, and the syntax of Polish. Within these general areas, she has worked on relative clauses (free relatives, correlatives, appositives, and light headed relatives), wh-questions (multiple wh-questions, across-the board wh-questions, wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns), coordination and ellipsis. On a more theoretical level, she is interested in the status of multidominance in the grammar. She is the author of three books: Symmetry in Syntax: Merge, Move and Labels (published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press), Phase Theory: An Introduction (published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press), and Merge: Binarity in (Multidominant) Syntax, co-authored with Martina Gračanin-Yuksek (published in 2021 by MIT Press). She is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics and serves on the editorial board of Syntax.