CV (pdf)

My research covers many areas in linguistic theory, especially syntax and its interfaces with systems for morphophonological and lexical expression on the one hand and with systems for conceptual and intentional semantic meaning on the other.

On the one interface, I explore the nature of ‘Spell-out’, the relationship between syntactic structures in the mind and their observable manifestation. Two developments in this area are the lexical insertion theory of spanning which is designed to handle words and concatenative morphology, and a phonological theory of nonconcatenative morphology (developed together with Patrik Bye) which is designed to handle the residue. The spanning theory is related to Distributed Morphology and to the Nanosyntax theory which was developed here at CASTL.

On the other interface, I have been working on the extent to which syntactic cartography can be derived from properties of the meaning systems with which syntax interfaces. Some of the results can be found in a paper (together with Gillian Ramchand) on deriving the functional hierarchy, and more in a slightly older paper (also with Gillian Ramchand) on  a way of limiting the amount of semantics that must be encoded in the syntactic representations.  A related development is a semantically informed cartography of spatial adpositions.