Background
Teaching
Fall 2007
- Ling240 Language and Mind
- Ling419 Topics in Syntax
(Links to syllabi coming soon)
Teaching Links
- Registered students can find course materials here on Blackboard
Research Interests
The main focus of my research has been to shed light on the relationship between semantic (and possibly pragmatic) interpretation and morphological marking of noun phrases, as mediated through syntactic representation. My dissertation focused on the syntax of direct object clitic doubling in a dialect of Spanish, providing an account of the optionality and the concomitant interpretive effects of clitic doubling in terms of the structure of the NP and a derivation that parallels that of possessor raising. In current research, I have been addressing this question by examining determinerless NPs and the relationship between the semantic representation of direct object NPs and the presence of "a-marking" in Spanish.
Another, independent, line of research focuses on locality and its expression in the formalisms that we use to model syntax. Specifically, this work has involved, first, formulating analyses of various syntactic dependencies (such as clitic climbing in Spanish and extraposition from NP in English) within the formalism of Tree Adjoining Grammar, and, second, exploring what implications these analyses have for restricting the expressive power of the formalism.
Downloadable Papers
Under Construction!
Linguistics Resources
