I am currently pursuing the four main research projects described below. I welcome student & professional collaborators in any/all of these areas. (I also have smaller projects involving scope & kinship terms; feel free to ask about them!)
Certain distributional patterns in English VP Preposing & VP Ellipsis have long been analyzed as involving “adjunct stranding”. However, recent developments in syntactic & prosodic theory suggest they might better be analyzed in terms of copy pronunciation. A prosodic re-analysis of VPP/VPE has important implications for VP structure, insofar as it removes one of the strongest arguments for VP adjuncts as right-adjoined elements. It also has implications for our understanding of the Syntax ⇔ Information Structure mapping.
In this project I am experimentally investigating the prosodic patterns of VPP and VPE given specific manipulations of the informational context and various “strandings” & “doublings” of VP material that these manipulations enable (or fail to).
Languages Studied in this Project: English
Papers/Presentations/Chapters:
2024 Larson R.K. VP preposing and constituency “paradox”. Linguistic Inquiry 55: 659–695.
2022 Larson R.K. Faces and vases. Invited talk presented at the First International Conference on Biolinguistics of the University of Quebec Three Rivers. (June 24-26, 2022).
2020 Larson R.K. VP preposing and constituency “paradox”. Invited talk presented at the New York Institute. (July 20, 2020).
Generalized Quantifier theory posits that quantifiers possess argument structure like other predicates. This suggests that notions of predicate projection based on θ-roles might apply to them. Results with θ-features from my earlier work suggest a way of formalizing these ideas within the Minimalist Program, yielding many intriguing semantic questions. For example, θ-features in vP/VP have a direct interpretation within Neo-Davidsonian event semantics. If θ-features also apply in the projection of DP/DegP, can they too be given a Neo-Davidsonian, event semantics interpretation?
In this project, I am working out the consequences of these ideas. Fascinating puzzles & challenges arise!
Languages Studied in this Project: English
Papers/Presentations/Chapters:
2024 Larson R.K. Quantification, matching and events. Natural Language Semantics 32: 269-313.
2022 Larson R.K. What adverbials & adverbial clauses may teach us about quantification. Cologne International Conference on Adverbial Clauses: Between Subordination and Coordination. (May 21, 2022).
2016 Larson R.K. Quantificational states and argument separation. Workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of the Nominal Domain. Frankfurt University, (February 5 2016).
What does it mean for a language to have a definite determiner (DD)? How do we diagnose its presence? The usual view (from Greenberg) is that having a DD = having a dedicated morpheme analogous to English “the”, or its equivalent in Spanish, French, German, Bulgarian, Macedonian, etc. However, it has been noted that languages that are “DD-less” in the Greenbergian sense may nonetheless make systematic use of de-stressed demonstratives (de-stressed 'that' or ’that’) in contexts where English would require use of a DD. In essence, when grammatical conditions require it, some DD-less languages appear able to “recruit” demonstratives as DDs. De-stressing appears to be crucial to recruitment. This observation raises a raft of interesting issues that I am following up in the project.
Languages Studied in this Project: English, Mandarin, Serbian, Japanese, Slovenian
Recent research has suggested that syntactic objects and their operations might be formalized with concepts and methods drawn from abstract algebra (Hopf & Lie Algebras), and that this formalization might provide insight into what operations and structures are available to the human expression-building mechanism and why. These developments are in connection with the newly developed Mathematical Theory of Merge, and a volume by Marcolli, Chomsky and Berwick (MIT Pres 2025). I am very interested in these developments and their potential for shedding light on questions such as why morphological word-formation (derivation and compounding) is not semantically compositional whereas phrase-formaation (syntax) is. I will teach a seminar on Fall 2025 in which participants and I will work their way through the Marcolli, Chomsky and Berwick volume, along with some background material.