Tanya Bondarenko

I am an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Harvard, and the director of the WOLF-lab. I study syntax and semantics, and I do fieldwork. The topics I am often thinking about are syntax and semantics of clausal embedding, argument and event structure, factivity/veridicality, verbal mood and polarity, cyclicity and locality of syntactic dependencies, complex agreement systems, and discontinuous noun phrases. A lot of my work is based on Altaic (Azeri, Balkar, Buryat, Korean) and South Caucasian (Georgian) languages; I have also done projects with Javanese and Russian. In 2024, my lab has started a collaboration with the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas on documentation and preservation of the Alabama language (Muskogean).

Before coming to Harvard, I got my PhD at MIT in 2022, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Lomonosov Moscow State University.

When I am not doing linguistics, I am usually working on gymnastic skills, dancing, or learning how to shoot 16mm film. I am a member of the MIT gymnastics team and Millenium Film Workshop.