I’m an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. My research is in theoretical syntax, and it’s driven by the following questions:
(1) What principles, elementary operations, and atomic elements determine how lexical items can and can’t be combined to form larger syntactic structures?
(2) Which of those are universal, which vary from language to language, and why?
(3) What are their cognitive (and other) underpinnings?
I’m interested in many syntactic processes and phenomena: (External and Internal) Merge, constituency, selection (especially L-selection), projection, adjunction, phases and (anti)locality, “wordhood” and (anti)mirror effects, and more.
In short, I seek to characterize the elementary operations that build syntactic structures and to determine why they have the properties they do. My research languages have included English, Latin, and P’urhepecha, among others.
[ ezyman at uchicago dot edu ]