About My Research
I study the structure of language, something linguists call syntax. I work from the assumption that the first task of syntactic research is to determine a set of primitives, such as structure building operations or even pre-built structures themselves, that can yield the complex structures we find in human languages.
Once a suitable set of primitives is in place, we can then investigate whether these primitives are generally available across cognitive domains (such as hierarchical concatenation), or whether these primitives are specific to language.
My research focuses on the nature of those primitives. Are they structure building operations or structures themselves? Are the constraints on the primitives categorical or gradient? Do the constraints hold within a single representation only, or do they hold across multiple representations? Over the past few years, I've been investigating the potential of acceptability judgments for answering these questions (a technique that has come to be called experimental syntax).
I'll leave you with a little wisdom from Oscar Wilde:
