Research Interests

I'm interested in animals (including humans), aliens, artificial intelligence, and ancient people. More specifically, I'm interested in developing accurate formalisms for how these groups might communicate, and aligning them with realistic hypotheses about evolution and emergence. Here are some specific questions I've been thinking about lately:

• How can we align hypotheses about locality conditions on long-distance phenomena (movement, agreement, case, binding, chains) with what we know about real-time production and comprehension
• How are clauses smaller than CPs embedded, and how are they interpreted without CP or NP shells? How do nonfactive verbs select for them?
• What accounts for the widespread cross-linguistic syncretism between possessive, perfect, experiential, and causative constructions?
• Could semantic/logical equivalence explain syntactic variation in the representation of non-referential nominal predicates?
• How did dolphins evolve learned communication, given their current lack of strong mate choice?
• How do we reconcile allosemy with the selectional restrictions of light verbs?
• How are head-finality and the pronunciation site of head movement represented as parameters in the brain?
• Was the evolution of learned communication in humans related to the evolution of pair-bonding?
• Is it possible to reconcile dependent case theory with phase theory in a way that provides explanatory and not just descriptive adequacy for case patterns?
• Does birdsong, whalesong, or any other form of non-human learned communication contain long-distance dependencies?
• How can long-distance dependencies be represented as local feature spreading without overgeneration and rampant invisibility?
• What do species with learned communication use it for besides attracting mates and defending territory, and how might these uses have evolved, culturally or genetically?
• Are object DPs phases? If not, does that mean that all other DPs are created either before the object DP, or after the next-highest phase (probably v or Voice)? If object DPs are not phases, does that mean vPs/VoicePs must be phases?
• How do acquisition parameters interact with historical change?