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Maria Polinsky

Russian and American linguist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ21015014
Source-derived summary

Maria “Masha” Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages.

Education and early life

Polinsky was born in Moscow, Russia. She received a B.A. in philology from Moscow University in 1979, an M.A. in 1983, and a Ph.D. in 1986 in linguistics from the Institute for Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her dissertation examined the structure of antipassives in several ergative languages.

Career

In 1989, Polinsky joined the University of Southern California as an Andrew Mellon Fellow, becoming an assistant professor in 1991 and an associate professor in 1995. In 1997, she joined UC San Diego as an associate professor, later serving as a full professor and as chair of the Department of Linguistics. She founded the department's Heritage Language Program in 2001.

From 2006 to 2015, Polinsky was a professor and Director of the Language Science Lab at Harvard University. In 2015, she took a position the University of Maryland as a professor in the Department of Linguistics and an Associate Director of the Maryland Language Science Center. At Maryland, she established a research field station in Guatemala.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Maria Polinsky” as russian and American linguist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Maria, Polinsky and Russian.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1979, 1983, 1986, 1989—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1956-01-01. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Maria, Polinsky and Russian providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Maria Polinsky”, the useful work is to connect “russian and American linguist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21015014. VIAF identifies the subject as 233359875. The Library of Congress control number is n93063123. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1983, 1986 and 1989.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Maria Polinsky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.