Dissertation: the role of loanwords in syntactic theory
My dissertation motivates the use of in syntactic research, examining what their syntactic behavior reveals about the nature of categorization, morpheme organization, and predicate structure. Loanword borrowing is a persistent process in all natural languages, making it a critical point of study for anyone interested in understanding the universal properties that hold across languages of the world. My research investigates the use of Sino-Korean words in the creation of verb and noun phrases, and the systematic ways in which this differs from the use of native Korean words. In my work, I identify and define the ways in which loanwords interact directly with syntactic processes like categorization and predicate formation, and address the ramifications these findings have on our understanding of what is possible within syntax. I argue that loanwords empirically tease apart two properties that often correlate together: lexical category, and the syntactic and semantic properties associated with a given linguistic unit.
Information structure effects on the acceptability of syntactic subject islands
A collaborative project alongside colleagues Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner, Matt Wagers and Ivy Sichel investigates Subject Islands under an experimental lens. Four undergraduate RAs have also been involved in the project: Matthew Vasser and Ulysses Noë (current), Alison Sun and Lisa Pham (past). Recent experimental and theoretical work calls into question the traditional syntactic view of subjects as strong islands: is there a truly syntactic component to islandhood, which cannot be reduced to pragmatic or semantic factors (Abeillé et al 2020; Winckel et al to appear; Goldberg 2006; Cuneo & Goldberg 2023)? We argue yes: when controlling for the independent costs of DP complexity and dependency length, we observe degraded acceptability of sub-extraction from subjects vs. objects across multiple construction types, each with different information structure (IS) characteristics. Three large scale acceptability judgment studies investigating three constructions (topicalization (TOP), wh-questions (WHQ), relative clauses (RC)) that differ in their IS profile, utilizing a superadditive design (Sprouse 2007; Sprouse et al. 2012), show evidence for a subject island effect, despite differences in the different constructions’ IS that are predicted to modulate the presence of a subject island violation under a purely discourse-based account of islandhood.