Research

Which aspects of syntactic structure have effects at the interfaces with syntax, and which do not?

Research areas

My research focuses on the ways in which syntactic structure plays a role in phenomena that seem to be beyond syntax. Some of these phenomena include:

  • information structure: how we organize information in an utterance -- for example, where we put new vs. old information in a sentence.

  • prosody: how languages like English use pronunciation to add meaning to a sentence -- for example, to highlight or background information.

  • discourse: how any particular utterance in an ongoing conversation connects to utterances just before it and after it.

  • expressive content: how words like so, and totally sit inside a sentence, but their meaning really has to do with something outside the sentence -- for example, the speaker's attitude toward what they're saying, or the context in which they're speaking. Curse words also act like this.

I'm especially interested in the interface effects of argument structure, the syntactic encoding of events and participants those events. One way I've been exploring the interfaces is in looking at the discourse effects of intransitive sentences. My dissertation focuses on the interface effects of unaccusative sentences, a special sub-type of intransitive sentence.

Recently, I've been focusing on intransitive sentences that share structure and meaning with existential sentences.

This research program is such that I am most interested in very bottom of the tree, or the very top of the tree (as a friend and colleague aptly put it).

Methodologies

One thing that makes linguistics fun is that all data involving human language shed light on what language users know about their language. The data that I work on therefore comes from a broad variety of methods. My work employs lab experiments (e.g., to explore prosody and pronunciation), corpus work -- to shed light on the interfaces (COCA is a great resource), work with native speakers of languages and dialects of English that I do not speak, as well as traditional acceptability judgments in the variety of English that I do speak.

"We cannot know in advance just how informative various kinds of evidence will prove to be with regard to the language faculty and its manifestations"

--Chomsky (1986), Knowledge of Language