Welcome!
I am Sylvia L.R. Schreiner (née Sylvia L. Reed).
I am an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Program in the English Department at George Mason University. I am currently the Program Director for the Linguistics PhD program.
I am undertaking ongoing work with the community of St. Lawrence Island on their language, Akuzipik, in collaboration with my colleague Lane Schwartz (University of Alaska Fairbanks). This work is currently funded by a 60-month NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) #BCS 2142340: “CAREER: Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics” and was previously funded by a 42-month NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grant: “NNA: Collaborative Research: Integrating Language Documentation and Computational Tools for Yupik, an Alaska Native Language”. You can read more about our project here and here.
I run the GMU Linguistics Language Documentation Lab. Email me if you would like to be added to the mailing list.
I work at the interfaces among syntax, semantics, and morphology. I am currently investigating topics including nominal functional structure; the morphosyntax and semantics of tense and aspect in Scottish Gaelic and St. Lawrence Island Yupik; varieties of central and non-central coincidence; and the syntax and spatial and temporal semantics of prepositions.
I do fieldwork on St. Lawrence Island/Central Siberian Yupik on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska; and on Scottish Gaelic and varieties of Scottish English in Scotland. I am committed to a community-centered model of linguistic fieldwork and documentation.
I completed my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Arizona in 2012. My dissertation focused on the semantics of grammatical aspect, with data from Scottish Gaelic and English. I completed my B.A. in Classical Studies at Carleton College in 2005. During my time at Carleton I also studied Linguistics, and I began my graduate studies in Linguistics in the fall of 2006. I received my M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Arizona in May 2008. I was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.