I am a senior lecturer in Scandinavian languages at University West. My main areas of research are syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and my work usually brings microcomparative data from the Scandinavian languages to bear on questions about the human capacity for language and theoretical linguistics.
More recently, I have developed an interest in language acquisition, and I am currently studying object shift in Icelandic and Swedish child language.
Topics I am interested in:
A-bar movement and extraction
relative clauses
object shift
information structure in the CP domain
anaphoric processes (ellipsis and pronominalization)
Selected recent publications
to appear. Peripheries – Scandinavian. In: Wurmbrand, Susanne, Mursell, Johannes. & Hartmann, Katharina (eds ): Handbook on the Syntax of the Germanic Languages. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter.
to appear. Spetsställning och satsflätor i färöiskan. En översättningsstudie. [Preposing and extraction in Faroese. A translation study] In: Moberg, Bergur Rönne (ed.): Frændafundur 10 Greinasavn frá føroysk-íslendskari ráðstevnu í Tórshavn 6.–18. august 2019, pp. 74–84.
2024 Filler–gap dependencies and islands in L2 English production: Comparing transfer from L1 Norwegian and L1 Swedish. with Dave Kush and Anne Dahl. Second Language Research.
2022. The pragmatics and syntax of pronoun preposing. A study of spoken Swedish. With Elisabet Engdahl. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 25, pp. 169–219.
2022. Extraction from relative clauses in Icelandic and Swedish: A Parallel Investigation. Languages 7(3) 163, pp. 1–26. (Part of the special issue Recent Advances in Research on Island Phenomena)
2022. Extraction and Pronoun Preposing in Scandinavian. With Elisabet Engdahl. Languages 7(2) 128, pp. 1–22. (Part of the special issue Recent Advances in Research on Island Phenomena)
2021. The development of object shift in Icelandic child language. With Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir. Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 499–512.
Dissertation
2017. Extraction from relative clauses in Swedish. Göteborgsstudier i nordisk språkvetenskap 30. Gothenburg: Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg. (diss. ISBN 78-91-87850-65-3)
Current projects
"The development of object shift in North Germanic child language"
Together with Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, Maia Andréasson, Ása Bergný Tómasdottir, and Iris Edda Nowenstein, I am currently studying how Swedish and Icelandic children acquire object shift. The project is funded by The Swedish Research Council (Dnr. 2022-02622, Humanities and Social Sciences).
I teach classes on grammar, semantics, sociolinguistics, and the language situation and language communities in the Nordic region.