Interview with Anissa Zaitsu
Anissa Zaitsu
The WHASC Editors recently had the chance to chat (virtually) with Anissa Zaitsu, who received her BA and MA in linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2018, with a thesis on reduced why-questions. After graduating, Anissa went on to hold a prestigious Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, before joining Stanford University as a PhD student in linguistics, where she is now. Her dissertation on negative concord in African American English is co-supervised by Vera Gribanova, also a Santa Crucian (PhD, 2010).
Could you tell us about your ongoing dissertation project at Stanford? What are the central questions you’re addressing, and what drew you to them?
My dissertation at Stanford focuses on Negative Concord, and in particular, tracks the distribution and interpretation of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in African American English (AAE) across a range of syntactically and semantically significant domains. In languages with NC, NCIs display a kind of variation: at times, they seem to convey negative meaning, while at other times, they do not. This variation is especially notable in Non-Strict NC systems, where NCIs routinely occur without an overt marker of clausal negation, particularly in the preverbal subject position. Although many approaches attempt to account for these facts within a unified framework, several critical questions remain unresolved, some of which challenge the viability of a unified approach.
I address these challenges by examining the NC system in AAE, a Non-Strict NC system that, relatively freely, allows Long Distance Negative Concord (LDNC), where an NCI can be separated from its licensing negation by a finite clause boundary. LDNC is useful for probing patterns that might be obscured in monoclausal environments. My research highlights that a key issue in previous approaches is the lack of attention to the semantic properties of NCIs, which should be involved in explaining its dependency on negation. I argue that the cases challenging a unified approach offer valuable insights into the semantic nature of NCI dependencies. Ultimately, I propose that a unified approach to NC is possible, but it requires a more nuanced semantic analysis, allowing for a relatively straightforward syntactic explanation of the dependency.
I have always been drawn to phenomena that reveal the division of labor between syntax and semantics, and my interest in Negative Concord patterns dates back to my time at UC Santa Cruz. I vividly remember my final assignment on Negative Auxiliary Inversion in Jorge Hankamer’s Syntax 1 class, which initially sparked my curiosity in this area. Later, as an MA student, I took Jim McCloskey’s seminar on polarity, where I encountered different theoretical approaches to Negative Concord. It’s rewarding to see my current research connect back to those formative experiences. I’m also proud to demonstrate how fieldwork on non-standard varieties, like AAE, is not only viable but also crucial for answering some of the most challenging theoretical questions.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your linguistics journey so far, and what challenges have you encountered along the way?
The most rewarding aspect of my linguistics journey has been connecting with people—whether in reading groups, classrooms, conferences, or casual hallway conversations. I love the collaborative effort involved in learning about language together, and being around intellectually curious people is motivating and exhilarating.
The most difficult part, however, is that sometimes we have to be still. We need to sit quietly with our ideas, deconstruct them, and piece them back together on our own. While the conversations you have with others are valuable and help inform this process, at the end of the day, it’s sometimes just you and a blank page. This kind of quietness has always been a bit challenging for me. I’m still working through it, and perhaps it will be a lifelong process, but it is incredibly rewarding when things finally click and the page becomes a kind of interlocutor of its own.
What advice would you give to current undergraduate/MA students at UC Santa Cruz interested in pursuing PhD-level research in linguistics?
Every challenge you face in research is a chance to uncover something new—not just about language, but about yourself. Pay attention to what sparks your curiosity, how you tackle difficult tasks, and what you care most about. Let these discoveries shape your next steps, both in academia and beyond.
