Education Qualification

Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003

Research Interests

• Natural Language Syntax and Typology of South Asian Languages
• Multilingualism in Education, Landscape, Human Cognition, and Politics

Experience

Professor Indian Institute of Technology, Madras 2012 - Present

Expertise

Language and Linguistics

Bio:

Rajesh Kumar is a professor of linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining IIT Madras, he taught at IIT Kanpur, and IIT Patna in India, and at the University of Texas at Austin in the USA. He has been a visiting faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai in India. His book on Syntax of Negation and Licensing of Negative Polarity Items was published by Routledge in their prestigious series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics in 2006. He is the associate editor of the journal Language and Language Teaching. The broad goal of his research is to uncover regularities underlying both the form (what language is) and sociolinguistic functions (what language does) of natural languages.

Honors and Awards

Fellowship University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, U.S.A. 2003

The excellent teaching assistant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, U.S.A. 2002

Henry Kahane award for Outstanding Teaching Assistant Department of Linguistics, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, U.S.A. 2001

Lectureship The University Grants Commission of India, New Delhi, India. 1997