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. I want to understand what part of human language is unique to our species, how we can represent it formally, and how it, along with everything else that was already in our brains, gives rise to cross-linguistic variation. I also want to understand what our brains can access at each stage of producing and comprehending a phrase, and what the link is between a grammar of competence and these on-line tasks. Here are some projects I've been working on:

Garsten, David. Under review. TSL case supports delayed gratification in Arabic small clauses. Society for Computation in Linguistics.
Garsten, David. Under review. Appl's got gravity: head movement, have-raising, and the evolution of (have) got. Chicago Linguistics Society.
Garsten, David. 2025. It's Giving Nonfactive Small Clause Selection. Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity 7 (3), 1-25.
Hampe, Anton* and David Garsten*. 2025. Revisiting the subregular complexity of Bengalese finch songs. SYNC 2025 (conference). *Equal contribution

And 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?
• Could semantic/logical equivalence explain syntactic variation in the representation of non-referential nominal predicates?
• Does birdsong, whalesong, or any other form of non-human learned communication contain long-distance dependencies?
• 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?
• 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?