Maria “Masha” Polinsky is an American linguist specializing in theoretical syntax and study of heritage languages.
[3] At Maryland, she established a research field station in Guatemala Polinsky's research focuses on the relationship between syntax and information structure (syntactic encoding of topic and focus), left and right dislocation, and more recently, on syntax-prosody interface.
She has also been an active practitioner of experimental work on understudied languages, in the fieldwork setting.
[6][7][8] Recurrent themes in her syntactic research include long-distance dependencies, control/raising, ergativity, and scope.
[13] In 2016 she was chosen as a member of the Linguistic Society of America's Fellows for "distinguished contributions to the discipline".