Syntax and Semantics
The study of syntax and semantics at Berkeley takes place in a uniquely lively and open environment, where the diversity of theoretical orientations and points of view encourages students and faculty to continually engage with their core assumptions.
A hallmark of the Berkeley program is its emphasis on the study of syntax as it relates to semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon—a perspective that originated with the development of Construction Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics here in the 1980s and 90s. It continues to inform the research of faculty and students today, as they work within a number of different theoretical frameworks, including Minimalism and Lexical Functional Grammar, as well as Construction Grammar.
Line Mikkelsen's research on copular clauses and object shift and Lynn Nichols' research on the lexicon and anaphora use formal tools and representations to integrate traditionally extrasyntactic (pragmatic, information structural, lexical semantic) phenomena into a broader model of syntactic structure. Eve Sweetser's research on conditional structures draws on and contributes to theories of stance and the syntax-semantics interface. In addition to these more formal approaches, research on syntax and semantics at Berkeley is informed by historical, typological, and cognitive approaches, promoting a well-informed view of language as a whole.
Syntacticians and semanticists at Berkeley are committed to making contributions to linguistic theory that are grounded in rigorous empirical work. Most are actively involved in the in-depth study of individual languages—which, frequently, are traditionally understudied and require on-site fieldwork.
Alice Gaby's intensive investigation of Kuuk Thaayorre (Paman: Australia) has shed light on the encoding of reciprocity. Sam Mchombo's research on argument linking in Chichewa (Bantu: South-central Africa) has contributed to theories of the morphology-syntax interface. Lev Michael's work on evidentiality and reality status (realisness/ irrealisness) in Amazonian languages has contributed to clarifying the typological validity of these categories, and to better understanding their pragmatic import in interaction. Lynn Nichols has conducted in-depth fieldwork on Zuni (isolate: Southwestern U.S.) that has contributed to a greater understanding of the lexicon and the relationship between lexical semantics and syntax. Richard Rhodes brings insights from his extensive fieldwork on Ojibwe (Algic: North-central North America), Métchif (French-Cree mixed: Northern Plains), and Sayula Popoluca (Mixe-Zoque: Southern Mexico) to bear on linguistic typology and analytical issues in better-studied languages.
Beyond the usual elicitation methods, a keen interest also exists in usage-based methodologies that involve psycholinguistic experiments and the creation and analysis of corpora. Susanne Gahl has helped pioneer methods exploring the relationship between language usage and linguistic structure.
The foundation for the study of syntax and semantics at Berkeley is the core courses (Linguistics 120, 220A, 220B, and 205), while seminars allow students to deepen their understanding of specific topics. Students and faculty engage with a wide range of topics in the field at Syntax Group, an informal reading group, and hear presentations of on-going research by faculty and students at weekly meetings of the Syntax & Semantics Circle. Each year, graduate students from Berkeley, Stanford, and UC Santa Cruz present at TREND, a trilateral conference on syntax and semantics. This collegial environment fosters collaborative research; some current and recent research projects include the investigation of noun-verb bias in languages of the world (Lynn Nichols and Johanna Nichols), Germanic verb phrase anaphora (Line Mikkelsen and graduate students), the typology of noun incorporation (Johanna Nichols and graduate students), Framenet, a computational lexicography project (Charles Fillmore and graduate students), the cross-linguistic realization of existential constructions (Line Mikkelsen and students), and the investigation of anaphoric epithets using statistical and corpus methodologies (Lynn Nichols and graduate students).