|
Amalia Arvaniti
:: Eric Bakovic :: Grant Goodall
:: Andrew Kehler
Robert Kluender :: John
Moore :: Maria Polinsky
:: Sharon Rose
Amalia Arvaniti
My research focuses on the phonetics and phonology of prosody--that
is intonation, rhythm, prosodic phrasing and stress--although I
have also worked on other issues in the phonetics-phonology interface,
such as geminate timing. I am increasingly interested in incorporating
the study of variation in my research, as in a recent paper entitled
"Dialectal variation in the rising accents of American English"
(with Gina Garding), and I am currently supervising student work
on related topics (e.g. gender-related differences in intonation).
The languages I work mostly on are Greek, my native language, and
English, but I have also supervised student projects in languages
as diverse as Japanese, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Armenian.
>>back to top
Eric Bakovic
My research focus is in phonological theory. I am particularly
interested in theoretical hypotheses concerning the analysis of
phonological data that make strong predictions beyond those data
both within and across languages. My most recent research in this
vein has been on adjacent similar segment avoidance, vowel harmony
and the phonology-morphology interface, and many aspects of Spanish
phonology and morphology.
>>back to top
Grant Goodall
My main research topic of late has been the interaction of wh-movement
and the positioning of verbal elements within the clause. A familiar
example of this is the phenomenon of subject-auxiliary inversion
that occurs in wh-questions in English. I have been exploring a
superficially similar phenomenon in Spanish wh-questions, but my
work indicates that the syntactic mechanisms underlying the English
and Spanish cases appear to differ in fundamental ways. Although
my explorations in this area have always been motivated by the potential
implications for syntactic theory, they have led me beyond the realm
of traditional syntactic theory in two ways: 1) I have been making
use of experimental techniques, such as very carefully presented
judgment tasks and tests for syntactic satiation, and 2) my preliminary
results force one to consider the possibility that some of the interaction
between wh-movement and verbal elements is due to processing effects.
>>back to top
Andrew Kehler
My primary interests center on the three-way interaction between
theoretical linguistic, computational linguistic, and psycholinguistic
models of discourse interpretation. The problems that are most likely
to keep me awake at night include the cognitive mechanisms that
underlie the establishment of coherence (both in discourse and more
generally), the principles that guide how people interpret (and
choose to produce) pronouns and other forms of reference, and the
circumstances under which a speaker may chose to elide information
and how it could be that such elision could facilitate the hearer's
comprehension process rather than hinder it. Current projects include
the development of new theoretical models of each of these processes,
the development of a system for pronoun interpretation that is learned
purely by self-training on very large datasets, and psycholinguistic
experiments investigating the relationship between discourse coherence
and pronoun interpretation strategies.
>>back to top
Robert Kluender
>>back to top
John Moore
John Moore's research has focused on syntactic theory and lexical
semantics. His syntactic work has concentrated on issues of locality
- locality of NP movement and the attenuated locality found in causative
and restructuring construction. While much of this work has concentrated
on Spanish, he has also published on Arabic, Turkish, and Russian.
The work on Russian, in collaboration with David Perlmutter, deals
with indirect objects versus dative subjects and impersonal constructions.
John's work on lexical semantics examines aspects of argument linking.
Together with Farrell Ackerman, he developed an extension of Dowty's
Proto-Role proposal that expands the empirical range of that theory.
John's dissertation on Spanish causatives and restructuring was
published in the Garland series; his work with Farrell Ackerman
is published in a CSLI monograph. In addition, John co-edited a
volume on Explanation in Linguistic Theory with Maria Polinsky.
John is currently an editor of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
>>back to top
Maria Polinsky
"Collaborative Research: Variation in Control Structures"
This National Science Foundation-funded project is joint work with
Eric Potsdam (University of Florida). Control constructions have
been at the fore of syntactic and semantic theorizing for the last
thirty years, and the research into the syntax and semantics of
Control constructions has led to important results in the domain
of clausal complementation. Most theoretical research on Control
has built heavily on the facts of English and a small number of
other well-studied, typologically similar languages. Such theories
of Control account for the canonical English Control pattern, Sandy
tried _ to remain calm. The core property of this construction is
a Forward Control relation: an obligatory interpretational dependency
between an overt argument NP and a lower unpronounced argument in
the complement clause. In this project, we will investigate variation
in the structural realization of this Control relation. A Backward
Control relation is a similar, obligatory interpretational dependency
in which the overt argument NP is in the lower position and the
higher argument is unpronounced. Backward Control has been proposed
in the literature for constructions in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,
Tsez, Korean, Malagasy, and other languages. The goal of this project
is to explore the empirical and theoretical issues surrounding Backward
Control phenomena. In the empirical domain, we will further document
Backward Control constructions cross-linguistically. We have been
developing a database of control patterns in selected language families.
In the theoretical domain, we will examine the implications of our
empirical findings for existing theories of Control and for syntactic
theory more generally. Currently, it seems that the most adequate
account of Control is one that unifies Control and Raising (e.g.,
as movement, following the proposal by Hornstein). If that's the
case, Backward Raising should be attested as well (parallel to Backward
Control). Preliminary data from Kabardian and Adyghe suggest that
this is the case. The current stage of our project involves work
on these languages. If forward and backward constructions are both
attested (in Control and in Raising), it becomes important to understand
what determines the choice of a forward construction over backward
(or vice versa). The current hypothesis is that this choice is determined
by information structure.
"Incomplete acquisition: The grammar of heritage languages"
An incomplete acquirer (heritage speaker) is defined as a speaker
of language X, who learnt X as his/her first language, spoke it
for several years during childhood as the only or primary language
and then switched to language Y, maintaining some knowledge of X.
Incomplete acquirers are often compared to uninterrupted acquirers,
but they also show some superficial similarities to L2 learners.
So what is it that incomplete acquirers actually know? It is sometimes
assumed, although without much evidence, that the linguistic competence
of incomplete acquirers is simply a reduced version of the competence
that uninterrupted acquirers have. Another common viewpoint is that
incomplete acquirers just retain a collection of random chunks of
their first language. At this point, we don't have enough experimental
or empirical evidence needed to understand the mental representation
of language that incomplete acquirers have, so one of the major
goals of this project is to collect such evidence in a systematic
way. I have been collecting empirical and experimental data on incomplete
acquisition of a number of languages (Russian, Armenian, Korean,
Lithuanian, Polish). Preliminary results indicate that incomplete
acquirers have structured linguistic knowledge, not just a collection
of random facts about their language. This knowledge however is
quite different from the language competence arrived at under uninterrupted
acquisition. I am currently conducting experimental work on the
incomplete acquirers' knowledge of lexical classes, gender classifications,
case, and tense.
>>back to top
Sharon Rose
My research interests are in phonology and morphology, particularly
within Ethiopian and Eritrean Semitic languages (linguistic designation:
Ethio-Semitic). I emphasize theory construction based on a solid
empirical database, working with native speakers. A descriptive
paper on Chaha morphology is to appear in a collection Morphologies
of Asia and Africa.My recent theoretical work has focused on long
distance interactions in phonology. One area includes a study of
long-distance consonant agreement (consonant harmony and co-occurrence
restrictions on consonants) undertaken with Rachel Walker at USC,
recently published in Language. Our proposal maintains that consonant
agreement should be analyzed via correspondence relations between
consonants rather than through feature spreading. The speech planning
underpinnings of this proposal have been investigated for Amharic
and Chaha consonant cooccurence restrictions in speech error elicitation
experiments, conducted with Lisa King, a former graduate student
at UCSD. Reduplication is another connected area of interest, particularly
in relation to Semitic morphology. Other recent work investigates
the interplay between gemination and the phonetic duration of the
following non-adjacent consonant in Endegen.
>>back to top
Home
| People | Undergraduate
Program | Graduate Program
Research | Events
| Language Program
UCSD Home
| Site Map
Department of Linguistics :: University of California,
San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive #108 :: La Jolla, CA 92093-0108
Phone: (858) 534-3600 :: TDD: (858) 822-255 :: Fax: (858) 534-4789
E-mail: linginfo@ling.ucsd.edu
:: http://ling.ucsd.edu/
|
