Professor of Linguistics, CASTL
Current Activities:
- Research: Developing nanosyntax,
a new framework for linguistics, based on the explosion of functional
projections and the growing structuralisation of semantics
- Seminar: Nanosyntax, Thu 10-12, Fall 09
- Debating Society: Saami syntax, Thu 2-4pm, Fall 09
- PhD thesis: Naoyuki Yamato - japanese focus particles
- PhD thesis: Victor Engmark - improving Open Access via tagging
- Org: lingbuzz
creator and maintainer. Currently due for a rewrite
- Org: egg school creator
and organiser. The next one will be in Romania and will focus on a special theme for us...
PhD Theses recently supervised:
- The nanosyntax of Case - 2009 - Pavel Caha. A fresh and
groundbreaking approach to case. Shows that case
morphemes are syntactically represented as a whole series of functional
heads, in a cumulative way: nominative is F1, accusative is F1+F2,
genitive is F1+F2+F3, etc. This allows to derive a strong constraint on
syncretism among case morpheme, discovered in this thesis, as well as a
number of facts about case.
-
Phrasal movement inside Bantu verbs - 2008 - Peter Muriungi. Shows
that the legendary mammoth Bantu verbs are best understood not only as
syntactic (with each morpheme its own chunk of syntactic structure) but
with typical syntactic remnant movement occuring within that structure,
along the lines of Cinque's U20 movements.
Papers available online