DFG-funded research project (10/2022–09/2025)

I am the principle investigator of the research project Revisiting phrasal units in the nominal domain/Neue Wege zur Nominalgruppe funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) with EUR 349’350.

The project aims at empirically and theoretically exploring a novel approach to the syntactic structures of nominal units such as a company/the president in various typologically distinct languages. Couched within recent developments of Labeling Theory (cf. Chomsky 2013, 2015) it considers the possibility that nouns and their related lexical and morphological properties (rather than determiners) determine some of the core syntactic properties which distinguish languages like English, Italian, German on the one hand, and languages like Russian, Latin, Polish on the other. A central feature of the latter languages is that nouns exhibit rich and varied case inflection, which is not the case in the former languages where case morphology on nouns is either absent or sparse. The central hypothesis is that in the latter languages assignment of a category label of the complex syntactic unit proceeds unproblematically even if only a noun is present. By hypothesis, the same is impossible in the former languages where nouns require "support" by a determiner category (like articles) for the nominal complex to receive a category label. Such differences constitute a new lexical parameter on a functional nominalizing head, I claim.

Workshop: Factors in Natural Language Design – the Nominal Domain and Beyond