university of california, irvine
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3151 SSPA Irvine, CA 92697-5100 |
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| 949.824.8444 | |
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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.
Syntacticians study these primitives in the hopes of explaining how it is that children learn (well, acquire) their language so quickly and easily. Their hunch is that some of the primitives are indeed specific to language and act to restrict the set of possible languages to a relative few (we call this constrained variation), such that children can't help but figure out the right one.
My research particularly focuses on three related questions concerning the primitives of syntactic theory: i) Are the primitives structure building operations or structures themselves? ii) Are the constraints on syntactic structure discrete or continuous in effect? and iii) Are the constraints on syntactic structure complex or simple?
I'll leave you with a little Oscar Wilde: