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Dmitry (Mitya) Privoznov

Postdoctoral Associate, Göttingen University

(email: dprivoznov [at] gmail [dot] com)

My name is Dmitry (or Mitya) Privoznov. I am a Humboldt Fellow postdoctoral associate hosted by Georg-August Universität Göttingen (sponsor: Hedde Zeijlstra).

I received my PhD in 2021 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy) under the supervision of (listed alphabetically) Patrick Elliott, Danny Fox, Sabine Iatridou, David Pesetsky and Norvin Richards. My PhD thesis was entitled "A theory of two strong islands" and can be found here. It is dedicated to a theory of syntactic islands based on the interactions between working memory and computational system (focusing on the Subject Island and the Adjunct Island).

I received my specialist degree (equivalent to MA) in 2014 from Moscow State University (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) under the supervision of Sergei Tatevosov. My specialist thesis was entitled "The typology of participial passives and passive participles" and can be found here (in Russian). It is dedicated to the syntax and semantics of passive participles and passive constructions in German and Russian.

I love doing linguistic fieldwork, and field elicitation (small scale qualitative fieldwork experiments) is my preferred way of doing research. I'm interested in a variety of topics in different sub-fields of linguistics, including the following:

lexical semantics (argument structure, event semantics, root modality, aspect, temporal adverbials and maximality inferences);
compositional semantics and pragmatics (discourse anaphora, presupposition projection, focus/topic and the semantics of A/A'-dependencies);
syntax (strong islands, cyclicity, scrambling, A/A'-movement);
morphosyntax (concord and template morphology).

I have worked on Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Algonquian and Austronesian languages, and intend to make this list longer in the future. Most of this research would not have been possible, if not for Moscow State University fieldwork trips lead by Sergei Tatevosov and Svetlana Toldova, which I have been participating in since 2010.

When I procrastinate, I watch TV series, films, read (predominantly, Russian and German literature, but, to repeat myself, I hope to make this list longer in the future) or code in C# and SQL. I also love to knit, cook, play the piano, hike and travel, when there is no pandemic, especially for fieldwork: it never hurts to work on languages that are spoken in beautiful places. All of this, and much more, I can't do without the best companion in the world, Neil Banerjee.