Research Interests:

1. Theoretical Linguistics: morphology, syntax, morphology-syntax interface (part. tense, agreement, case)
2. Psycholinguistics: language learnability theories; language acquisition of (morpho-)syntax in healthy-developing children
3. Neurolinguistics: language impairments, part. Specific Language Impairment (SLI); inflectional morphology in children with SLI
4. Cognitive (Neuro)Psychology: Neurocognition of developmental disorders; language and memory (part. the organization of the mental lexicon)

Dominik has been a doctoral student at Georgetown since 2002, studying linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. He is mainly interested in the connection between a linguistic theory and child language acquisition. His main projects in graduate school have been in child language acquisition of morphosyntax, particularly the acquisition of inflectional morphology (specifically, tense and agreement) and formal language learnability theories. In the Brain & Language Lab, Dominik is studying the acquisition of morphosyntax in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) from both a linguistic and a neurocognitive perspective, trying to bridge the two approaches in the field of language development.

Representative Publications:

Rus, D. (In press). What Momma Still Had to Teach You - Towards a Variational Model of Early Morphosyntactic Development. To appear in Georgetown Working Papers in Theoretical Linguistics. Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Rus, D. (In press). Early root nonfinites and the acquisition of finiteness in child grammar: Evidence from early child Slovenian. To appear in Proceedings of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) XIV: the Princeton Meeting. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavica Publications.

Rus, D. (In press). The acquisition of finiteness in early child grammars: Some novel evidence from early child Slovenian. To appear in Lecturas Sobre Psicolingüística. Universidad Autónoma de México. Mexico City, Mexico.

Rus, D. (2005). Slovenian embedded imperatives. In C. Brandstetter & D. Rus. (Eds.) Georgetown Working Papers in Theoretical Linguistics, Vol 4, 153-183. Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Rus, D. (2003). Quirky verb movement in Slovenian. Georgetown University Ms.

Rus, D. & P. Chandra. (In press). Child Language Imperatives: Root Infinitive analogues? To appear in Proceedings of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA): the Siena Meeting. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Rus, D. & P. Chandra. (2006). Questioning the "Imperatives as Root Infinitives" Hypothesis. To appear in BUCLD30: Proceedings of the 30th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Rus, D. & P. Chandra. (2005). Bare participles are not root infinitives: Evidence from early child Slovenian. In Brugos, A., R. Clark-Cotton, M. & S. Ha. BUCLD 29: Proceedings of the 29th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development 29: 493-503. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.