Linguistics and English Language

My principal research interests are in formal syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and the interaction between them. I now work mainly within the framework of Dynamic Syntax and my current principal (and inter-related) obsessions are:

• the interpretation of copula clauses;
• definiteness;
• existentials;
• right periphery phenomena;
• expletive constructions.
• explanatory approaches to case-marking

Between 2007 and 2010, I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (from September 2007) to work on a dynamic analysis of case-marking entitled The dynamics of case: an inferential approach to morphological case-marking .

ESRC Project RES-000-22-0941 'Syntactic expressions of information structure: data for comparative analysis.': A recently completed one-year project with Dan Wedgwood and Gergely Petho looking at the 'focus position' in Hungarian, gathering corpus data to assess the closeness of fit between the usew of the focus position in Hungarian and the it-cleft construction in English and the adequacy of recent suggestions for the syntactic and semantic analysis of the focus position. One of the outputs is a database of corpus examples of this construction available in excel format:

• Database of examples of the focus position in Hungarian
• Explanation of construction and content of database by Gergely Petho
• Hungarian focus position and English it-clefts: the semantic underspecification of focus readings by Dan Wedgwood, Gergely Petho and Ronnie Cann (unpublished MS)

• Publications and Papers

• Co-editor of Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory. (Oxford University Press)
• Postgraduate Supervision

2011/2012

Convener for Pre-Honours courses in Linguistics and English Language.