My primary focus is syntax. My dissertation research focuses on the morphosyntax of case and agreement. I have also worked on control, partial control, the processing of plurals, and inalienable possession.
If you'd like to know about control in Icelandic, check out my WCCFL 26 paper.
A bit about my dissertation:
My thesis utilizes case and agreement phenomena to explore the nature of the syntactic operation Agree. By case, I mean what is standardly assumed – Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Absolutive, Ergative, etc. By agreement, I am referring to the morphological realization of phi features (person, number, gender) of one item on another item.
The fundamental questions I ask are: Where and how are words formed? Are words formed in the syntactic component of the grammar, with the morphology being simply a reflection of syntactic processes or are there separate word formation processes that occur in the morphology? The standard assumption is that Agree is responsible for both case and agreement. However, recent work has challenged the idea that both case and agreement are handled in the syntax. For instance, McFadden (2004, 2006) proposes that case is assigned post-syntactically via a morphological algorithm. Bobaljik (2006) also assumes that case is assigned post-syntactically and goes a step further by proposing that the agreement is also determined strictly in the morphology. Bobaljik’s key insight is that agreement tracks case – i.e., only DPs with certain case values can trigger agreement.
This thesis evaluates proposals in which both case and agreement are determined in the syntax, via Agree, as well as proposals in which both case and agreement are determined post-syntactically in the morphology. I show that forcing both case and agreement into the syntax leads to unnecessarily complicated structures while forcing both case and agreement into the morphology fails to capture the fact that agreement is often – but not always - dependent on case.
I argue that case is indeed part of the narrow syntax and is assigned via Agree. However, I follow Bobaljik’s proposal that agreement is a post-syntactic phenomenon and occurs in the morphology. Situating case and agreement in different components of the grammar nicely captures the dependency found in some constructions. This approach has the added benefit of accounting for constructions in which case and agreement come apart. For instance, in some constructions, a verb only optionally displays agreement with a particular noun. However, the case borne by that noun is not optional. The crux of the proposal is as follows: case is assigned in the syntax via Agree; the morphology has access both to the syntactic structure and to the output of the case assignment process, various morphological principles determine whether a DP that bears a particular case will trigger agreement. Placing case and agreement in different modules of the grammar allows for a stricter, narrower syntax, while also capturing a dependency that holds in some constructions and an optionality that holds in other constructions.