BA Linguistics 1987, McGill University
Ph.D. in Linguistics 1993, University
of Maryland, College Park.
Associate Professor of Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages.
Visiting positions held at Harvard University, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of Missouri, University of Brasília, Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute, Zentrum für Allgemeinesprachwissenschaft
Research interests: syntax/semantics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistcs.
My work concerns syntax–the principles that govern the combination of words into phrases and sentences. Syntactic representations in spoken language are linked to both phonological representations and semantic representations. My work mainly concerns this latter interface. Syntax is important to understanding a wide variety of areas within human cognition, and is important for understanding how language is acquired, how the human sentence processor works and how language breaks down when brain damage occurs. Much of my work in syntax has revolved around issues in the syntax of coordinate structures, both in terms of their phrase structure and their extraction properties. Building on a paper originally published in the McGill Working Papers in 1987, I have been developing a theory of coordination based on the idea the coordinate structures are asymmetrical adjunction structures headed by a conjunction. There is now a substantial amount of supporting evidence for asymmetric conjunction from a variety of sources. Two areas that I have been especially concerned with are agreement asymmetries in various languages and asymmetries in Across-the-board (ATB) A-bar movement structures.
One of the strongest arguments for asymmetric conjunction concerns mismatches
between syntactic and semantic categories as evidenced by so-called "first
conjunct agreement", a phenomenon in which verbs agree with just one conjunct
of a conjoined subject when the agreement takes place under government. This
phenomenon is widespread in language generally (I have worked with speakers
of Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and British English) and raises serious
questions as to whether all agreement can be subsumed under one syntactic relation
as recent minimalist accounts propose. Now that the supporting evidence is mounting,
I am currently addressing two new problems that arise out of the asymmetric
coordination analysis.
While it has now become quite routine for analyses of coordination to adopt
an asymmetric conjunction phrase, there is also a large amount of evidence that
coordinate structures are semantically symmetrical. This evidence is largely
ignored in the syntactic literature on coordination, although most semantic
analyses of conjunctions assume that conjuncts must all be of like category.
The conflicting syntactic and semantic evidence raises a serious problem for
the syntax/semantics mapping, and this is one of the main problems that I am
currently working on. Simply put, how is an asymmetric syntax mapped into a
symmetrical semantics? I am pursuing the hypothesis that conjunctions are pro-forms
and that conjuncts are related to them either anaphorically or by predication.
Under this hypothesis, none of the conjuncts is directly an argument of the
head that selects the conjoined phrase as a whole. This hypothesis, if correct,
has a number of implications outside the realm of coordination, including the
correct analysis of certain noun-incorporation structures, relative clauses
and temporal adverbial clauses.
A second major problem raised by the asymmetric conjunction analysis is that
of ATB movement. I have argued that one consequence of asymmetric coordination
is that ATB movement cannot exist, and have provided evidence to this effect
for A-bar movement. However, many analyses of other coordination phenomena still
seem to require ATB A-movement or ATB head movement. This has led to some serious
paradoxes in the literature. To cite one notable example, Kyle Johnson's influential
analysis of gapping simultaneously requires ATB head movement but non-ATB A-movement.
The existence of these paradoxes indirectly supports the idea that ATB movement
is a heterogeneous phenomenon, and that separate analyses are required for what
has been considered ATB A-and head-movement. I am currently developing hypotheses
for each sort of movement.
In addition to my work on coordination, I have also been working extensively on the syntax and semantics of bare nominals. In this work, which is being done in collaboration with Cristina Schmitt, we argue that the syntax of bare nominals in both argument and predicative positions must be taken into account in order to correctly explain the distribution of bare singular count nominals. We argue that differences in the morpho-syntax of Number can account for a wide range of crosslinguistic data including the presence of bare singular arguments in Brazilian Portuguese (and their absence in the other Romance languages and English) and which we argue correlates with the presence of bare singular predicates in Romance. We are currently working on the syntax of ininitival relatives in Portuguese.
My work in Language Acquisition attempts to connect theoretical results in syntax to experimental investigations of young children's language. In collaboration with Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux (University of Toronto) and Cristina Schmitt, we have been testing hypotheses about children's interpretations of definite noun phrases in both English and Spanish. These two language differ in subtle ways in the ir use of definite determiners, but the external distribution of the morphosyntactic forms is quite similar. This creates an interesting acquisition problem. In particular, we are interested in uses of the definite which are in some resepcts 'non-canonical', for example, the use of the definite to form generic interptetations, and the use of the definite in contexts of inalienable possession.You can find out more about this research at the MSU Language Acquisition Lab web page.
I also have done research in psycholinguistics, specifically syntactic processing I have done some online reading studies of coordinate structures in collaboration with Charles Clifton and Lyn Frazier at UMass., Amherst. In a number of experiments we show that syntactic parallelism facilitates processing of coordinate structures, but that the parallelism effect extends into the internal syntax of the conjuncts themselves, and argues against specific grammatical restrictions on identity of syntactic category in coordination. In collborative work with Ming Xiang, Cristina Schmitt and Fernanda Ferreira, I have studied garden path sentences in Chinese and the influence of null objects in processing Chinese sentences.
In neurolinguistics, I have worked on syntactic deficits in aphasia in collaboration with Alan Beretta and Cristina Schmitt.