Sylvia L.R. Woodrose Schwartz

Sylvia L.R. Woodrose Schwartz

Sylvia L.R. Woodrose Schwartz

Director

Director of the Language Documentation Lab

Associate Professor

Syntax, morphology, semantics, language documentation and revitalization; Scottish Gaelic, St. Lawrence Island / Siberian Yupik; aspect, tense, mood, modality; Distributed Morphology; roots and categories; nominals and nominal functional structure.

Sylvia Woodrose Schwartz (formerly Schreiner) is a linguist specializing in syntax, morphology, semantics, and language documentation & revitalization. Much of her work to date has focused on the morphosyntax and semantics of tense, aspect, mood, and modality. She leads an NSF CAREER project documenting Akuzipik/St. Lawrence Island Yupik and engaging in reciprocal training with community linguists, and has worked on documenting Scottish Gaelic since 2007. 

Selected Publications

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. 2021. Span–conditioned allomorphy and late linearization: Evidence from the Classical Greek perfect. Glossa 6(1): 64. 1-28. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1400

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., Lane Schwartz, Benjamin Hunt, and Emily Chen. 2020. Multidirectional leveraging for computational morphology and language documentation and revitalization. Language Documentation & Conservation 14, 69-86.

Schwartz, Lane, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, and Emily Chen. 2020. Community-focused language documentation in support of language education and revitalization for St. Lawrence Island Yupik. Études Inuit Studies 43(1/2).

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., and Megan Schildmier Stone. 2016. A future modal in Cherokee: a special case of distributed exponence. Morphology 26, 33-63. Online: DOI 10.1007/s11525-015-9270-3.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., and Andrew Carnie. 2016. The syntax and semantics of Scottish Gaelic a’ dol aL. Journal of Celtic Linguistics 17, 1-30.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. 2015. The creation and interpretation of nominal predicates: Bi+ann in Scottish Gaelic. Lingua 154, 110-139.

Expanded Publication List

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., Benjamin Hunt, Emily Chen, Preston Haas, and Ukaall Crystal Aningayou. (2022). Semantic fieldwork from a distance with speakers of Akuzipik. In Semantic Fieldwork Methods Vol 4:2.

Koonooka, Christopher Petuwaq, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, Giulia Masella Soldati, Lane Schwartz, Benjamin Hunt, Preston Haas, Emily Chen, and Hyunji Hayley Park. 2021. Akuzipik/Yupik (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, USA; Chukotka, Russia) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 20, 135-144.

Schwartz, Lane, Emily Chen, Hyunji Hayley Park, Edward Jahn, and Sylvia L.R. Schreiner. 2021. A Digital Corpus of St. Lawrence Island Yupik. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10496)

Schwartz, Lane, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, and Emily Chen. 2020. Community-focused language documentation in support of language education and revitalization for St. Lawrence Island Yupik. Études Inuit Studies 43(1/2).

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., Lane Schwartz, Benjamin Hunt, and Emily Chen. 2020. Multidirectional leveraging for computational morphology and language documentation and revitalization. Language Documentation & Conservation 14, 69-86.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. Nominal predication and the semantics of roots. 2019. In Maggie Baird and Jonathan Pesetsky, eds., Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Volume Three. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications. (pre-publication version)

Hunt, Benjamin, Emily Chen, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, and Lane Schwartz. (2019). Community lexical access for an endangered polysynthetic language: An electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations), 122-126.

Schwartz, Lane, Emily Chen, Benjamin Hunt, and Sylvia L.R. Schreiner. (2019). Bootstrapping a Neural Morphological Analyzer for St. Lawrence Island Yupik from a Finite-State Transducer. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages: Vol. 1, Article 12, 85-96.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., and Megan Schildmier Stone. (2016). A future modal in Cherokee: a special case of distributed exponence. Morphology 26, 33-63. Online: DOI 10.1007/s11525-015-9270-3.

Manuscript version available for download here.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R., and Andrew Carnie. (2016). The syntax and semantics of Scottish Gaelic a’ dol aL. Journal of Celtic Linguistics 17, 1-30.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. (2015). The creation and interpretation of nominal predicates: Bi+ann in Scottish Gaelic. Lingua 154, 110-139.

Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. (2014a). The syntax-semantics/pragmatics interface. In A. Carnie, Y. Sato, and D. Siddiqi, eds., Routledge Handbook of Syntax. London: Routledge. (Link to book site)

Reed, Sylvia. (2014). A Distributed Morphology analysis of tense and aspect in Greek. In Annamaria Bartolotta, ed. The Greek Verb. Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics. Proceedings of the 8th International Meeting on Greek Linguistics, Agrigento, October 1-3, 2009, 277-290. Walpole, MA: Peeters, Louvain-la-Neuve. (Link to book site)

Reed, Sylvia L. (2011a). The semantics of Scottish Gaelic tense and aspect. In Andrew Carnie, ed. Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics, 255-282. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (Link to book)

Reed, Sylvia L. (2013). On the meaning(s) of after in varieties of Scottish English. In Dan Brenner, ed., Coyote Papers 21: Proceedings of the Arizona Linguistics Circle 6. Tucson, AZ.

Reed, Sylvia L. (2012d). The Semantics of Grammatical Aspect: Evidence from Scottish Gaelic. University of Arizona, Tucson dissertation.

Reed, Sylvia L. (2012c). Evaluating prospectivity in a Neo-Reichenbachian aspectual system. In Dan Brenner, ed., Coyote Papers 19: Proceedings of the Arizona Linguistics Circle 5. Tucson, AZ.

Reed, Sylvia L. (2012b). Review of Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Volume 1, ed. by C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger & P. Portner. In M. Macaulay, ed. Linguist List 23.2292.

Reed, Sylvia L. (2012a). Multiple perfects in Scottish Gaelic. In Jaehoon Choi, E. Alan Hogue, Jeffrey Punske, Deniz Tat, Jessamyn Schertz, and Alex Trueman, eds. Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 389-397. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Reed, Sylvia L. (2011b). Review of Introducing Semantics by Nick Reimer. In Monica Macaulay, ed. Linguist List 22.341. 

Reed, Sylvia L. (2008). A position class analysis of the Greek verbal paradigm. Proceedings of the thirty-eighth Western Conference On Linguistics. Michael Grosvald and Dionne Soares, eds. Davis, CA.

Grants and Fellowships

2022- NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) #BCS 2142340: CAREER: Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics.

2018- NSF Documenting Endangered Languages Grant (Principal Investigator) #BCS 1760977: Navigating the New Arctic: Collaborative Research: Integrating Language Documentation and Computational Tools for Yupik, an Alaska Native Language.

2020 George Mason University College of Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Research and Development Award: Building and Assessing Resources for Language Documentation and Revitalization

2018 The Mathy Junior Faculty Award in the Arts and Humanities

Courses Taught

LING 306: General Linguistics
LING 485: Semantics and Pragmatics
LING 486: Syntax I
LING 520: Introduction to Linguistics
LING 673: Field Methods
LING 689: Morphology
LING 785: Semantics and Pragmatics
LING 786: Syntax I
LING 787: Syntax II
LING 788: Semantics and Pragmatics II
LING 886: Advanced Syntax Seminar
LING 898: Advanced Qualifying Seminar

Education

BA in Classical Studies: Carleton College

MA and PhD in Linguistics: University of Arizona

In the Media

https://www.gmu.edu/news/2022-10/research-project-aims-document-and-support-yupik-language

Dissertations Supervised

Benjamin T. Hunt, Maanillu, akmanillu: Community-led, Iterative Development of Tools for Language Documentation and Reclamation (2025)