Dr. Nurit Melnik is a linguist in the Department of Language, Literature, and the Arts. Her research focuses on syntax; particularly the syntax of Modern Hebrew. Her work spans theoretical, computational, and corpus linguistics and addresses a wide range of topics, including grammar engineering, constructions and the relationship between form and function, agreement alternation, lexical and syntactic flexibility of multi-word expressions, and the cognitive aspects of language change. Melnik tests the limits of the formal approach to language, acknowledging and even celebrating the fuzziness and imperfections of real language use.
Melnik is the co-author, with Dr. Zef Segal, of Computational Literacy for the Humanities: Mathematics and Programming in Context (Routledge), which grew out of their jointly developed introductory online course in digital humanities, "Who's Afraid of Numbers? Math and Computation for the Humanities" (in Hebrew).