Presentations
[this is probably incomplete, feel free to email for anything that's not here]
2023. Reflexivity mismatches under ellipsis revisited. Boundaries of ellipsis mismatches workshop, Tsuda University/online. Slides.
2023. Getting out of the way in Icelandic: a sideward movement approach. GLOW 46, Vienna. Poster.
2022. One-anaphora in a microcomparative perspective. CGSW 36, University of Chicago. Handout.
2022. Preserving the locality of selection with layering derivations. GLOW 45, QMUL. Poster here, accompanying handout here.
2022. On the derivation of prepositional datives in Scottish Gaelic. Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics II, online and hosted by University of Arizona. Slides.
2021. Deriving 'late merge' with external remerge. NELS 52, Rutgers. With Caroline Heycock. [see the proceedings paper here]
2021. "Nobody didn't dare... in them days": subject negative concord in British English varieties. NWAV49, UT Austin /online. Slides here.
2021. A syntactic reassessment of Goidelic pronoun postposing. UMass Syntax Workshop/online (also CASTLfish talk, Tromsø). Handout.
2021. On the derivation of prepositional datives in Scottish Gaelic. DGfS workshop on ditransitives/online. Handout.
2020. Explaining microvariation with the Tolerance Principle. GLOW Berlin/online. Slides here. (also presented in a Yale colloquium, in person.)
2019. Sidestepping agreement. University of Maryland Linguistics Colloquium, 11th October. Handout here, similar material presented at UPenn and UConn in 2020 (online).
2019. Reassessing case-matching. Sluicing@50 Workshop, University of Chicago. Handout here.
2019. Exhortative clauses in Scots. Paper presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, New York January 2019. With Craig Sailor. A handout here. (Also presented at FRLSU 2018, Glasgow.)
2018. Antireconstruction as layering. Poster presentation at NELS 49 (see proceedings paper here).
2018. The curious development of have-raising. GLOW 41, Budapest. With David Adger, Caroline Heycock and Jennifer Smith. Slides. (Versions also presented at Cambridge, NYU. Paper coming soon!)
2018. Cliticization or affixation: English contracted negation revisited. LSA Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT. With David Adger, Caroline Heycock and Jennifer Smith. Slides.
2017. Realizing syntactic dependencies: a case study of remnant movement. IGRA, Universität Leipzig. Handout here. Reporting on joint work with George Walkden.
2017. Variation in amn't is explained by productivity, not competition. Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop 32, Trondheim. With David Adger, Caroline Heycock and Jennifer Smith. Slides. (Related versions presented in Newcastle, Edinburgh, Konstanz, Tromsø and MIT.)
2017. When silence gets in the way: extraction from do-ellipsis in British dialects. Paper presented at LSA 2017, Austin TX. With Craig Sailor. Handout. (see the proceedings paper)
2016a. On some surprising contractions in Scots dialects. Paper presented at Edinburgh, UCL and then (in truncated form) LAGB 2016, York. The UCL handout is the most complete one, it's here; the LAGB one is here. With David Adger, Caroline Heycock and Jennifer Smith as part of the SCOSYA project. (Version also presented at PSST in Princeton 2019; see the full paper in Language.)
2016b. NPIs and NP structure. Paper presented at LAGB 2016, York. With Patrick Elliott. Handout here soon.
2015a. Forming chains with covert copies: deriving the locality restrictions on QR. GLOW 37, Paris. With Patrick Elliott. Poster here.
2015b. QR out of control. WCCFL 33, Vancouver. With Patrick Elliott. Handout here.
2014a. Resumption and island repair under sluicing. Paper presented at LAGB 2014, Oxford. With Klaus Abels.
2014b. Reconstruction and modification in relative clauses. Paper presented at LAGB 2014, Oxford. With Caroline Heycock.
2013a. Remarks on negation in varieties of Scots. Paper presented at the ReCoS workshop "The Comparative Syntax of English," University of Cambridge, November 7th. With David Adger, Caroline Heycock and Jennifer Smith. Handout here.
2013b. Discontinuous deletion and remnant movement. Paper presented at Manchester Forum in Linguistics, University of Manchester, 15th November. Handout here. (overlapping material also presented at MIT Syntax Square in April and at the University of Göttingen in June).
2013c. Island evasion explains variability in island repair. Paper presented at Manchester Forum in Linguistics, University of Manchester, 15th November. Handout here (overlaps with CLS paper). With Matt Barros and Patrick Elliott.
2013d. What kind of syntactic identity condition? Keynote at "Identity in ellipsis" workshop, Leiden University, September 26th. Handout here (write-up coming v soon).
2013e. On the non-existence of non-constituent coordination and non-constituent ellipsis. Paper presented at WCCFL 31, Arizona State University. With Craig Sailor. See proceedings paper above.
2013f. Predicate fronting, remnant movement and linearization. Invited seminar talk at UCLA, NYU and Rutgers (reporting joint work with George Walkden)
2013g. Anti-reconstruction, anti-agreement and the dynamics of A-movement. Paper presented at GLOW 36, Lund. Handout here.
2013h. More variation in island repair: the clausal/non-clausal island distinction. Paper presented at Chicago Linguistics Society 49. With Patrick Elliott and Matt Barros.
2012a. Constraints on exceptional ellipsis are only parallelism effects. NELS 43, CUNY Graduate Center. See the write-up above.
2012b. Pseudo(pseudo)gapping and the syntax of ellipsis. UCL Linglunch. Handout.
2012c. Pseudo(pseudo)gapping in Scottish Gaelic: ellipsis, parallelism, A'-dependencies. Paper presented at Celtic Linguistics Conference 7, Rennes, 22/5/12. Handout.
2012d. Ellipsis, polarity and the variety of verb movement in Scandinavian. Paper presented at Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, Yale University, 1/6/2012. Handout (supersedes Edinburgh workshop one).
2012e. Ellipsis, polarity and the variety of verb movement in Scandinavian. Paper presented at the Edinburgh Verb Movement Workshop, 15/2/2012.
2012f. Yes and no, merge and move, ellipsis and parallelism. Paper presented at The Syntax of Yes and No Workshop, Newcastle University, 8/6/12. Handout.
2012g. Towards a movement theory of ellipsis licensing. Paper presented at UiLOTS, Utrecht. (This material revises and updates stuff in Thoms 2010a; versions have also been presented in Newcastle, Edinburgh and Groningen.) Here.
2011a. Lexical mismatches in ellipsis, the identity condition, and island amelioration. Paper presented at NELS 42, University of Toronto, Nov 11th 2011. Handout.
2011b. Roll up! PBC effects, anti-locality and Japanese scrambling. Paper presented at the LAGB annual meeting, Manchester, September 8th. Handout. (Paper also presented at MIT "Syntax Square", Nov 15th 2011)
2011c. Getting rid of uninterpretable features: blind movement and Justification. Paper presented at Colloquium on Generative Grammar XXI, Seville, April 9th. Handout.
2010a. `Syntactic reconstruction and Scope Economy.' Paper presented at GLOW 33, Wroclaw, April 2010. Abstract and handout
2010b. `Syntactic verb movement without uninterpretable features: evidence from ellipsis.' Paper presented at the Verb Movement: its nature, triggers and effects Workshop at University of Amsterdam, 12/12/2010. Handout.
```Verb-floating and VPE: towards a movement account of ellipsis licensing.' Paper presented at Brussels Conference in Generative Linguistics 4 (special theme: Ellipsis), CRISSP, Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Brussels. [2010c supercedes this] Abstract and handout
`British ``team'' DPs and theories of scope.' Paper presented at LangUE 09, University of Essex. [handout available for this short version; a longer, expanded version of this paper is in preparation.] Abstract and handout