Syntax at NU

Syntax at Northwestern

Research

We are interested in a range of topics relating to the syntax of human languages, including the cognitive processes underlying sentence parsing and production, how syntactic structures change over time, as well as formal syntactic theory. We use a variety of methodologies including:

Corpus analysis
Psycholinguistic studies
Computational modeling

Faculty Research Interests

Brady Clark

Within the study of historical linguistics, my focus is syntactic change through the analysis of corpus data. The empirical core of this work has been primarily syntactic change and variation in early English, particularly the gradual decline of OV order and change and varation in the syntax of subjects. I am also interested in computational models of language change and evolution.

My formal syntax work is focused on identifying the appropriate grammatical model for syntactic varation and change. I am particularly interested in grammatical models that are embedded in the inherent variability tradition initiated by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968).

Masaya Yoshida

The focus of my research is on aspects of syntactic representations both in static knowledge of language and in real time sentence processing. The studies I have carried out so far attempted to integrate work in theoretical and typological syntax and experimental psycholinguistics in order to reveal representations of sentence structures built in real time and mechanisms working behind online sentence processing.

I am interested the human sentence processor's ability to use already-seen materials to project not-yet-encountered sentence structures. In my research on sentence processing I'm trying to reveal: (i) what are the mental representations that the parser employs (theoretical syntax), (ii) whether the detailed syntactic structures are fully represented by the parser (experimental sentence processing), and (iii) how such representations are built by the parser (computational studies).

My research in the area of theoretical syntax has been devoted to the formal properties of ellipsis phenomena. Specifically, my research focuses on the identity condition on ellipsis through investigating Sluicing and Gapping constructions.