Research and projects

• Double objects, information status, syntax. Relationship between discourse and syntactic properties of double object constructions cross-linguistically and in thie history of English.

• Passivelike things in Hmong, Tongan, and other places. Interaction of apparent passives with apparent clefts and relative clauses in a variety of unrelated languages and the relevance of all of this to constructions and the theory of form-function pairings.

• Language contact and borrowing of discourse function from Tahitian to Tahitian French. Function of reflexive elements iho and meme; borrowing of discourse function across syntactic boundaries; syntax and semantics of reflexivity.

• Indirect questions, D-linking, and presupposition. Indirect questions vs. factives as triggering word order variation in copular embeddings; difference between which phrases and simple wh-phrases with respect to these embeddings; differences of word order as reflecting implicature/presupposition phenomena.

• Development of the English modal: loss of English subjunctive and replacement by Modern English modal class; corpus evidence suggests that definition of a distinct semantic modal class preceded its syntactic differentiation; subjunctive inflection and modal category do not co-occur after about 1150; semantic blocking theory at work.

Past projects, papers, etc

• Ditransitives and acquisition. Presented at PLC 27, 2003.
• Learning to talk. Invited seminar given at University of Illinois at Chicago. February 2003.
• What can the pragmatics of double object alternations tell us about their syntax? Presented at CLS 37, April 19-21, 2001.
• The pragmatics and syntax of double object alternations. Dissertation proposal defense handout. December 2000. [postscript] [PDF]
• Reconfiguring syntax, or some good reasons why we shouldn't. Paper given at the Workshop on the Interaction Between Syntax and Pragmatics, University College London, April 5-8, 2000. To appear. Cambridge University Press. [postscript] [PDF]
• Passive and passive-like constructions in Hmong. With C. Creswell. Paper to appear in the proceedings of the 19th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. [postscript] [PDF]
• I speak Tahitian (French): reflexives and the borrowing of discourse function. Paper presented at the Sixth Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, April 16-19, 1999.
• Syntax, semantics, chicken, and egg: remarks on the development of English modal auxiliaries. Poster presented at the 18th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, April 8-11, 1999.
• Reflexives and constraints on the borrowing of discourse function: creoles and Tahitian French. Proceedings of the 23rd Meeting of the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 6.1. [postscript] [PDF]
• Syntax, semantics, chicken and egg: some remarks on the development of modal auxiliaries in English. Preliminary version presented at the SLE workshop on modality in generative grammar, August 1998; to appear in Modality in Generative Grammar, Benjamins.
• Double objects and information status: presented at the 34th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, April 17, 1998. To appear in CLS34: Main Session.
• Effects of complement and adjunction structures on text processing and attention span: Summer 1996. With C.R. Fletcher and J. Jobling. Presented at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse.
  
  

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