Origins & Early Life

Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax". Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

She has made fundamental contributions to these fields. A festschrift in her honor, Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols, was published in 2013. Nichols's best known work, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, won the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1994. In 2013 Nichols was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2023 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.

Enduring Legacy & Impact

Predicate Nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. ISBN...

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