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I'm a lecturer in the UC Davis Department of Linguistics. 

Contact me: jnykiel@ucdavis.edu or jo.nykiel@gmail.com

News: Here is a special issue of the Journal of Linguistics guest-edited by Gabriela Bilbiie and myself: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-linguistics/issue/524673ADC641AAE198954BCB1FF341EF 

Research interests

I’m a syntactician with a special interest in constraint-based frameworks and in English, both contemporary and historical. My research examines questions lying at the syntax-semantics interface, particularly in the area of ellipsis (e.g., fragments, sluicing, pseudogapping, and Verb Phrase Ellipsis). Some of these questions are: How are meanings assigned to what look like syntactically incomplete utterances? What is the syntax of such utterances? These theoretical questions have taken me on a quest for contextual (e.g., processing-based) factors that determine the use of ellipsis and the choice of syntactic alternatives, where these are available. Here further questions arise: How much linguistic information must be encoded in an ellipsis, and supplied by surrounding context, for successful resolution? What kind of information is it? I address them by combining psycholinguistic experimentation with corpus-based work and modern statistical methods. 

Keywords: constraint-based syntax, elliptical constructions, syntactic variation, syntactic change, experimental syntax, processing of syntactic structure, modern quantitative methods in linguistics