News

• 18–20 November 2026 — Talk with Edgar Onea at the Biennial of Czech Linguistics 2026, Masaryk University, Brno: Discourse topics: domain widening, relational pronouns and gender tracking in Czech.
• November 2026 — Classificatory copular clauses: Evidence from Czech (with Edgar Onea) is to appear in Acta Linguistica Academica; preprint on lingbuzz. Three further papers posted to lingbuzz: Topic pronouns in Czech, The unbearable simplicity of being something and Differential object marking in Levantine Arabic.
• 2026 — McMaster International Initiatives Micro-Fund, Horizon Europe Seed Funding (2026–2027), to develop a Horizon Europe partnership.
• 2026 — C.L. Baker Award of the Linguistic Society of America for research excellence in syntax. Reappointed Director of ARiEAL for 2026–2031. Squib You’re the only one who unifies published in the Festschrift for Danny Fox (MITWPL; lingbuzz).
• 2025 — SSHRC Insight Grant (2025–2030), Nominal integration in associative, comitative and accompaniment structures: A comparative syntax study. Launch of Tehatiwennathe’tányons, the online resource hub for Indigenous adult immersion programs.

About

Ivona Kučerová (also written Ivona Kucerova) is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and Director of McMaster’s Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics (ARiEAL), a position she has held since 2021 (renewed to 2031). In 2026 she received the Linguistic Society of America’s C.L. Baker Award, the discipline’s international award for research excellence in syntactic theory, conferred every two years on a single mid-career scholar. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007) and an MA from Charles University in Prague, was a postdoctoral fellow at University College London (2007–2009), and has been at McMaster since 2009.

Her research asks how the structure of sentences (syntax) relates to their meaning (semantics). She argues that syntax is the autonomous core of the human language faculty and that meaning arises when syntactic structures are handed over to the interpretive system; much of her work consists of diagnostics that separate what syntax does from what the interfaces do. She tests this model on genetically unrelated languages (Czech and other Slavic languages, Icelandic and German, Italian, Levantine Arabic, Inuktitut, Mohawk) and, increasingly, with experimental methods such as EEG and eye-tracking in her Syntax Lab.

Since 2016 she has also worked with Indigenous communities in Ontario, Quebec and New York State on adult immersion and language reclamation, in particular with Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa, the Mohawk adult immersion program at Six Nations of the Grand River, and with Oneida and Tuscarora partners. This community-led work has produced Tehatiwennathe’tányons, an open-access resource hub for community-based adult immersion programs (2025), and McMaster’s Diploma in Indigenous Language Revitalization (co-created with Anna Moro; opened 2024). Before turning to theoretical linguistics she worked in computational linguistics, on statistical machine translation (with Michael Collins at MIT) and on the Prague Dependency Treebank.

Research areas

• Linguistic theory: the architecture of the human language faculty; the autonomy of syntax and its interfaces with meaning and form; the nature of syntactic features; economy of derivation and representation; the division of labour between syntax, semantics and morphology.
• Syntax–semantics interface: φ-features (person, number, gender) and their interpretation; agreement and Agree; labelling and phases; presuppositions and their grammatical realization; information structure (givenness, focus, topic); the left periphery; the structure of the noun phrase (NP vs. DP, quantification, split constructions, associative plurals); copular clauses and anaphora.
• Syntactic theory: well-formedness conditions on syntactic structure; null subjects; Case (nominative, dependent case, differential object marking); head movement; ellipsis; roots and derivational timing.
• Comparative syntax: Slavic (Czech, Polish, Russian), Germanic (Icelandic, German), Romance (Italian), Semitic (Levantine Arabic), Inuit (Inuktitut, Inuttut) and Northern Iroquoian (Mohawk/Kanien’kéha).
• Experimental syntax and neurolinguistics: EEG and eye-tracking studies of syntactic dependencies, agreement and aspectual processing in typologically distinct languages.
• Indigenous languages and language revitalization: Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, Inuktitut; adult immersion pedagogy; intergenerational transmission in the home; community-centred and Indigenous research methods.
• Morphology: inflectional versus derivational morphology; number and gender marking; nominal functional categories.
• Computational linguistics (earlier work): statistical machine translation; parsing of free-word-order languages; treebank annotation.

At a glance

• Position: Professor (tenured), Department of Linguistics and Languages, Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University (Professor since 2023; Associate Professor 2016–2023; Assistant Professor 2009–2016)
• Leadership: Director, ARiEAL (2021–2031); member, Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition
• Education: PhD Linguistics, MIT (2007); MA Czech Language and Literature, Charles University (2002); doctoral coursework in computational linguistics, Charles University (2000–2002)
• Honours: C.L. Baker Award, LSA (2026); LSA Linguistic Service Award, as co-founder of the LSA mentoring program PUMP (2020); President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision, McMaster (2016)
• Editorial: Editorial board, Cambridge Elements in Generative Syntax (Cambridge University Press, 2021–); chief editor, Journal of Slavic Linguistics FASL 31 special issue (2024)
• Professional service: Accreditation Board, Graduate Program in Theoretical Linguistics, Masaryk University (2008–); Canadian Linguistic Association, Member-at-Large (2014–2016) and nominating committee (2022–2025); reviewer for Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Language, Glossa, SSHRC, the Canada Research Chairs program, the Czech Science Foundation and Poland’s National Science Centre
• In the media: her Indigenous language revitalization work was featured in The New York Times (April 2023) and on CBC News (2023)
• Teaching: semantics (LING 3II3), advanced syntax and its interfaces (LING 4LC3), advanced semantics (LING 4AS3), syntax (LING 2SY3); graduate courses in the Cognitive Science of Language program (COGSCIL 6LC3, 6AS3, 725/726, 731, 734)

Working with me

I supervise MSc and PhD students in McMaster’s Cognitive Science of Language program and host postdoctoral fellows and visiting researchers through ARiEAL. I welcome students interested in theoretical syntax, the syntax–semantics interface, experimental syntax, and Indigenous language revitalization. If you would like to work with me, please email me with a short description of your research interests and a CV. Current and former lab members are listed under Lab & students; funded projects are listed under Funding & projects.

Last updated: November 2026.