Projects
Syntactic Government
Please see the Call for Papers for the Conference on 'Syntactic Government and Subcategorisation' to be held at the University of Cambridge 31 Aug - 3 Sep 2011: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~ak243/gvt/. Abstract submission deadline: Monday, 4 April 2011.
Since Oct 2008, I have been working as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow on a project dealing with a typological and theoretical investigation of syntactic government. This proposal arose from my previous work on Grammatical Features, during which it became clear that while linguists now had a detailed typological and theoretical account of syntactic agreement, syntactic government was still unexplored to the same depth. Some of the outstanding problems with establishing whether non-canonical phenomena are indeed instances of agreement or government are due to the lack of clear and systematic criteria for syntactic government.
In the proposed research I will fill this central gap by constructing a general typology of syntactic government, and a theory of syntactic government based on a canonical approach. I aim to offer criteria by which to identify less typical instances of government, and arrive at a systematic inventory of government phenomena. These will be available to be taken up and tested by syntactic theories or used in computational modelling.
Grammatical Features
From Nov 2004 - Oct 2007 I was Research Assistant to Prof. Greville Corbett on an ESRC-funded project 'Grammatical Features: Key to Understanding Language' (grant number RES-051-27-0122).
The aim of the project was to deepen the knowledge of the linguistic concept 'feature' by bringing together typological research on the content of features with formal work on their behaviour. One of the objectives was to produce an inventory of morphosyntactic features, listing features proposed, with sources pointing to the decisive evidence. The inventory was envisaged as a stepping-stone for asking: What can be a feature? What features occur across different components? How do features interact? What potential features, as inferred from the patterns of the occurring features, appear to be missing from the feature inventory? The typological approach was meant to help ensure that any proposed feature theory could meet the range of diversity found in natural language.
An inventory of features which were found to be morphosyntactic, and a list of others which were investigated but no evidence was found for their morphosyntactic status, can be viewed at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/morphosyntacticfeatures.html. More information, discussion, examples, and references pertaining to each feature can be found on the Grammatical Features website: www.features.surrey.ac.uk, mirrored at: www.grammaticalfeatures.net.
The catalogue of the various types and uses of features has constituted the basis for the theoretical conceptualisation of the notion 'feature'. It has helped demonstrate the type of features on which linguistic theory can legitimately call and the implications of adopting different theoretical perspectives on features while using them for the same descriptive goals. Many interim results of the project were presented at conferences, invited talks and lectures, in a number of published papers (see the Features Outputs page for a detailed list), and at the dissemination conference (see the homepage of the Workshop on Features). A monograph on Grammatical Features is in preparation. The project was evaluated by the ESRC as 'Outstanding'.
