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My main interest is theoretical syntax and at the moment I am focussing particularly on subjects. More specifically, I am interested in the position of subjects - including expletive subjects, like the English it and there - within the clause.
I took my undergraduate degree in Linguistics, German and French at the University of Durham and did my MPhil in Linguistics here in Cambridge last year. I am now in the first year of my PhD.
My work focuses on Chomsky's (1981, 1982) Extended Projection Principle [EPP] which, in its original form, stated that every finite clause must have a subject. In my masters thesis I looked at how the EPP has been recast in the current minimalist theory of syntax (Chomsky 1995 onwards), considered how it might be satisfied in different ways in the Germanic languages (cf. Richards & Biberauer 2005), and used this theory to present an account of Icelandic expletive and thematic subject distribution. In my doctoral work, I am currently:
(i) trying to develop an account of the EPP as a specific instantiation of a more general requirement which holds for all phases universally;
(ii) examining the various possible methods of EPP-satisfaction in several languages from different families (though I am refining my ideas about Germanic at present);
(iii) looking for correlations between the method of EPP-satisfaction and other properties of the language (verb movement, rich inflection, verb second etc.), and seeing if these correlations can be modelled in an implicational parameter hierarchy; and
(iv) exploring whether EPP effects hold in the nominal domain.
I hope that this work will shed some light on the limits of syntactic variation, the interaction between various parameters and the way in which changes in parameter values can be triggered.
Besides my main research, I also have an interest in psycholinguistics and the biological mechanisms which underlie language processing, and so the fact this year’s focus is on the cognitive aspects of language is particularly exciting.
I’m always keen to expand my knowledge of various areas of linguistics and besides some of the syntax and acquisition courses, as a keen musician, I’m particularly interested in the ‘syntax of music’ course as a way of linking my work and hobby. |