Monik Charette

In 2001, Charette spoke at the Ninth Manchester Phonology Meeting in the session Phonology and syntax - the same or different?, where she presented the Government Phonology perspective. In 2009, she co-edited, with Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, David Nathan and Peter Sells, the volume Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, London: SOAS. Her contributions to the understanding of the syllable in phonological theory, of Turkish vowel harmony and of schwa in French are acknowledged in handbooks and companions to phonology.

Charette's most cited work is her monograph from 1991, Conditions on Phonological Government, published by Cambridge University Press, which is the first extended study written within the framework of phonological government. In her analysis of French, she contributed to the general understanding of the relation between skeletal positions and higher prosodic structure in the form of her "pointless onsets" in h-aspiré words. She participated in the preparations of the festschrift for Jonathan Kaye, Living on the Edge, eventually edited by Stefan Ploch alone and published in 2003.

Charette is one of the founders and first proponents of Government Phonology, the phonological adaptation of Government and Binding Theory in syntax, with work done on vowel-zero alternation in French, on government-licensing, on headedness in element theory, on empty and pseudo-empty categories, on Turkish word-structure, among many others. Government Phonology she contributed the concepts of government-licensing and licensing constraints; in 1989 she was the first to propose a phonological version of the Minimality Condition.

Charette earned her BA from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and her MA and PhD from McGill University, graduating in 1988. By 1989 she was working as a Training Fellow in Linguistics at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies; by 1990 she was a lecturer in linguistics there, and later became a senior lecturer, teaching courses on phonology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She was also associate dean for postgraduate matters at the Faculty of Languages and Cultures.

Monik Charette (born 29 May 1957) is a French-Canadian linguist and phonologist who taught at SOAS the University of London, in the United Kingdom. She specializes in phonology, morphophonology, stress systems, vowel harmony, syllabic structure and word-structure, focusing on Altaic languages, Turkish, and French.