Luke Adamson

Dr. Luke Adamson is a tenure-track Researcher in Research Area 3 'Syntax and Lexicon' at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin. Previously, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University (2020–2022) and served as Lecturer at Rutgers University (2022–2023). He earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (2019) and holds dual degrees from Oberlin College: a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Music in Cello Performance (2010–2014).

His research focuses on nominal features, grammatical gender, and syntactic modularity, with notable projects exploring gender locality hypotheses, coordination resolution in three-gendered languages, and suppletion phenomena. Collaborators include prominent linguists such as Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University), and Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam). Key contributions include work on gender assignment constraints in languages like Greek, Swedish, and Lithuanian, as well as syntactic interfaces in Jarawara and Italian.

Recent presentations include invited talks at the University of Geneva (June 2025), Yale University (October 2024), and the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (December 2024). He co-edits Linguistic Inquiry Squibs & Discussion and organizes the ZAS Brown Bag Lunches. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

Adamson’s academic networks span formal linguistics and typological studies, with ongoing projects addressing politeness pronouns in Romance languages, emotive predicates in clausal complements, and allosemy in Greek gender systems.