Professional interests and current projects

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My broad interests lie in the area of meaning (semantics), and its relation to form (morphology and syntax) and use (pragmatics). I am also interested in the foundations of semantics and philosophy of language (mainly questions regarding truth, belief, and context sensitivity). I have worked on various topics in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and always within a comparative crosslinguistic perspective, with emphasis on variation in meaning and form. My main language of study is Greek; besides Greek, I have also worked on Romance (Spanish and Catalan mainly), Germanic languages (German and Dutch), and recently, in joint work, on Chinese, Basque, and Korean.

Specific topics that I have worked on include the following:

1. Negation, polarity (negative polarity, negative concord, free choice, scalar phenomena);

2. Scope, definiteness and indefiniteness;

3. Quantification and noun phrase structure, specificity, clitics;

4. Tense, aspect, temporal connectives, the perfect, genericity;

5. Dependent tense and mood; mood selection

6. Focus and topicalization, focus particles, focus and scalarity;

7. Ellipsis (DP internal ellipsis, sluicing);

8. Wh-structures (questions, free relative clauses, pseudoclefts)

9. Metalinguistic comparatives in Greek and Korean

10. Context sensitivity of quantifiers; domain dependence versus specificity

11. Sentence building in home sign systems; sign languages

Currently, I am working on the following projects:

· The internal structure (syntax and semantics) of the quantificational noun phrase, with emphasis on context dependence and specificity. I am co-editing a book with Monika Rathert (to appear with Oxford, January 2009), and working with Urtzi Etxeberria on Greek and Basque quantifiers and context sensitivity.

· Sign language and home sign systems. Since June 2006, I have been collaborating with Susan Goldin-Meadow and Carolyn Mylander (Dept. of Psychology, University of Chicago) in grant NIH R01 DC00491 “Spontaneous Sign Systems in Five Cultures.” This project investigates home sign systems (developed by severely deaf children in the absence of any language input), and we have discovered that nonveridicality is manifested in these systems as a category that unifies negation with questions.

· Metalinguistic comparatives. This is work that started last year (2007), with a collaboration with Melita Stavrou (University of Thessaloniki) and continues with my Suwon Yoon (U. of Chicago). The parallel between Korean and Greek metalinguistic comparatives is striking.

· Dependent tense. See Publications for a recent paper that will appear in Lingua.

· Bilingualism, literacy, and education policies