Topics: Argument Structure, Phrase Structure, Derivational Morphology, Lexicon-Syntax Interface
Research Statement for Syntax and Morphology
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What principles constrain the structure of words? Is there a limit on the number of possible words (within a language and across languages)? Do purely structural, language-internal factors (syntax) play a role in limiting such number? |
| Painting by Orestes Gaulhiac | Topics: Argument Structure, Phrase Structure, Derivational Morphology, Lexicon-Syntax Interface |
Through the study of linguistic phenomena, I engage in the task of developing a formal theory of the human linguistic faculty. This activity has brought me to pursue a research agenda within the cognitive approach of Generative Grammar, although I keep an active interest on other theories of language with similar objectives. A core idea in Generative Grammar is that the structural properties of all natural languages reflect an innate linguistic capacity, which we call Universal Grammar (UG).
I specialize in the morphosyntactic study of the smallest independent units of language: words. We lack a standard theory of the best way to characterize the internal relationships encoded in words (their argument structure) and the structural requirements they impose on the syntactic form of sentences. Also, we lack an understanding of why there is a surprisingly small range of variation with respect to argument structures in the world’s languages. We can hypothesize that the reason for such highly restrictive behavior and variation relies on the limitations imposed by the primitive elements those argument structures are made of. My research agenda is presently focused on eliciting such primitive elements and their encoded limitations, as well as on exploring the consequences of such an idea for the analysis of language (the construction of a grammar) and for our conceptions of the human mind.
In my dissertation I discussed some consequences of a theory in which structural relationships are taken as the primitive building blocks of argument structures, from which the grammatically-relevant parts of their meaning are derived, as designed in Hale and Keyser (2002). I address two questions: (a) how do we explain the limited set of argument structure types that we find crosslinguistically? and (b) how do lexical structures relate to sentential syntactic structures? The approach taken in pursuing an answer to these questions represents a radical departure from the most popular standpoint in the current approaches of the literature (mainly, the belief that the licensing of arguments in the syntax is conditioned by underlying semantic, or at least aspectual, factors). Instead, structural factors are taken to constrict possible meanings (i.e., possible argument structures). In my dissertation I present a series of studies expanding H&K’s theory to new domains, such as Spanish prepositional verbs and Spanish and Catalan affixes, and explore their significance for a universal typology. In addition, I explore the consequences of a radical version of their theory, in which recursion is banned from the lexicon and very concrete predictions are thus formulated on the question of the maximum number and the typology of possible argument structures in natural language
Hale and Keyser’s (2002) theory is surely going to occupy an important part of my immediate research plans. As a new theory that has not achieved general recognition yet, it is bound to show its productive potential in the near future, and I aim to contribute to that. I am currently working on more applications of these ideas to a variety of lexical phenomena, especially within the realm of Romance morphosyntax, following work in my dissertation. Concretely, I am presently engaged on an investigation of the restricted ways in which adverbial aspectual features are expressed in the argument structure of verbs crosslinguistically, which seems to follow two patterns: they either get implemented as an additional verb (which itself has an independent argument structure), or they incorporate onto the verb (sometimes in the form of a particle). In pursuing an explanation of this variation, it is interesting to explore the consequences of a theory that considers such features as the expression of an additional node of some argument structures, as opposed to a theory that gives them the status of “indexical” features, lacking an independent structural node.
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