My interests center on the human ability to use and to learn to use language. Among the many uses to which language is put, perhaps the most basic is the transmission of information. It is a marvelous fact that competent speakers of a language can communicate even completely novel thoughts and ideas with ease. At its heart, this is due to the fact that humans become attuned to certain regularities in the form of the expressions of their languages, which contribute to the meaning of an utterance in a systematic way. My work focuses on formally characterizing the kinds of linguistic regularities to which humans are attuned, and the nature of the contributions the various regularities can make to the interpretation of utterances.
2010. On Late Adjunction in Minimalist Grammars.
Talk given at MCFG+ 2010.
[Slides]
2009. On Ellipsis: Linguistic, Computational, and Cognitive
Perspectives.
Invited talk at Formal Grammar
2009.
[Slides]
2009. Eliminating Sidewards Movement.
GGS 2009
[Slides]
2009. Inverse Linking in Minimalist Grammars.
[Draft]
2008. A Note on the Complexity of the Deletion Theory of Elliptical
Sentences.
Workshop Theoretische Computerlinguistik, Tübingen.
[Slides]
2008. Hypothetical Reasoning and Association with Focus.
9th Szklarska Poreba Workshop.
[Slides]
2008. Argument! Another look at the X-or-no-X
construction.
[Draft]
2007. Parsing Elliptical Structures.
[Draft]
2006. Mild Context-Sensitivity is not enough.
[Draft]
2005. Pregroups, Products, and Generative Power.
Talk given at the Chieti Workshop on
Pregroups and Linear Logic.
[Slides]
2005. Comparing Typologies of Quantity-Insensitive
Stress Systems with and without Gradience. With Jeff Heinz and Jason
Riggle.
Talk given at the 79th LSA.
[Handout]
2004. The Syntax of Complement Clauses in Asante Twi.
With Harold Torrence.
Paper presented at the 35th Annual Conference on African
Linguistics.
[Draft]
2002. Structure and Similarity.
Talk given at the University of Tübingen.
[Handout]
to appear. The acceptability cline in VP ellipsis. With
John Hale, Christina Kim, and Jeff Runner.
Revised version to appear in Syntax
to appear. Deriving Reconstruction Asymmetries.
Revised version to appear in A. Alexiadou, T. Kiss and G. Müller
(eds.), Local Modelling of Non-local Dependencies.
Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
2010. Inverse Linking via Function Composition.
Revised version appears in: Natural Language
Semantics 18(2): 183-196
2010. Without Remnant Movement, MGs are Context-Free.
In C. Ebert, G. Jäger and J. Michaelis (eds.), MOL 10/11, Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 6149, pp. 160-173.
2010. A Formal
Foundation for A and A-bar Movement
In C. Ebert, G. Jäger and J. Michaelis (eds.), MOL 10/11, Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 6149, pp. 145-159.
2009. Evaluating the Complexity of Optimality Theory. With Jeffrey
Heinz and Jason Riggle.
Revised version appears in: Linguistic Inquiry 40(2): 277-288.
2009. Syntactic Identity in Survive Minimalism: Ellipsis and the Derivational Identity Hypothesis
In: M. Putnam (ed.), Towards a Derivational Syntax: Survive Minimalism. John Benjamins.
2008. Agreement Bottlenecks in
Italian
In: C. Casadio and J. Lambek (eds.), Computational
Algebraic Approaches to Morphology and Syntax. Polimetrica, Monza
(Milan).
2008. Across-the-Board
Extraction and Minimalist Grammars
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+9).
2007. An Automata-Theoretic
Approach to Minimalism. With Christian Retoré and Sylvain
Salvati.
Model Theoretic Syntax at 10, 19th ESSLLI
2006. Generating Copies: An
investigation into Structural Identity in Language and Grammar
PhD Thesis, University of California at Los Angeles
2006. Focus and Intervention
in Asante Twi. With Harold Torrence.
In: Papers on Information Structure in African Languages, ZAS Papers in Linguistics
2006. On Pregroups, Freedom, and
(Virtual) Conceptual Necessity. With Marcus Kracht.
Proceedings of the 29th Penn
Linguistics Colloquium
2005. Features Moving Madly : A
Formal Perspective on Feature Percolation in the Minimalist
Program
Revised version appears in: Research on
Language and Computation 3(4) : 391-410
2005. Two Type 0-Variants of Minimalist Grammars.
With Jens Michaelis.
Proceedings of the 10th conference on Formal Grammar and the 9th Meeting on Mathematics of Language
2005. Grammar Structure and the Dynamics of Language
Evolution. With Yoosook Lee, Travis C. Collier, Edward
P. Stabler, and Charles E. Taylor.
Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Artificial Life.
2004. Induction of Prototypes in a Robotic
Setting Using Local Search MDL. With Richard Brooks, David
Friedlander, Jason Riggle, Edward Stabler, and Charles Taylor.
Proceedings of the The Ninth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics (AROB).
2003. The learning and emergence of mildly
context sensitive languages. With Travis C. Collier, Yoosook Lee,
Ying Lin, Jason Riggle, Edward P. Stabler, Charles E. Taylor, and Yuan
Yao.
Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life
(ECAL)
2003. Grounding as Learning. With Travis
C. Collier, Yoosook Lee, Ying Lin, Jason Riggle, Edward P. Stabler,
Charles E. Taylor, and Yuan Yao.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Evolution, 15th ESSLLI.
2002. Formalizing Mirror Theory.
Revised version appears in: Grammars 5(3):
177-221.
2002. Learning Mirror Theory. With Travis
C. Collier, Edward P. Stabler, ad Charles E. Taylor.
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining
Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+6).
2001. Natural language interface to an
intrusion detection system. With Travis C. Collier, Edward
P. Stabler, Charles E. Taylor, and Kyubum Wee.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems (ICCAS).