Current Research by Graduate Students
The diverse backgrounds of the Berkeley Linguistics Department's members create an open-minded environment where graduate students pursue a wide variety of interests within the descriptive, experimental, and theoretical study of syntax and semantics. They work within a number of different theories of syntax, including Construction Grammar and Minimalism. Amongst the various projects that graduate students are currently working on are
- the syntax and semantics of focus in Pulaar,
- serial verb constructions in Totonaco and Tibeto-Burman,
- complex predicates in Persian,
- the clause structure of impersonals and expletives,
- English coordination,
- disfluency and repair,
- the morphosyntax of Georgian and discourse,
- anaphora in English and Spanish,
- the role of constructions in evoking metaphor,
- Russian aspect, and
- a typological study of noun incorporation.
More generally, graduate students have interests in:
- applying experimental methods to gathering syntactic judgments,
- syntax's interfaces with the lexicon and the phonology (PF),
- argument structure, and
- approaches to studying syntactic change.
Languages and language families studied include
- the Atlantic subfamily of Niger-Congo,
- Iranian,
- Slavic,
- Basque,
- sign languages,
- Hupa, and
- Bantu.