Robert Truswell

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences
The University of Edinburgh
Dugald Stewart Building
3 Charles St
Edinburgh
EH8 9AD
Scotland

r t r u s w e l at s t a f f m a i l dot e d dot a c dot u k

Publications and Downloadable Papers

Presentations and Handouts

Research Interests

A fully acceptable utterance is one that satisfies all the constraints placed upon it by various linguistically-related components, from phonology through morphosyntax and semantics to our pragmatic knowledge and conceptual representation of the world. When we find an utterance degraded, we know that some constraint, somewhere along the line, was not satisfied, but we have no way, a priori, of knowing what that constraint is, or which linguistic component it comes from. I believe that many current theories attribute more of these wellformedness constraints to the syntactic component than they should, and that a clearer understanding of the structures generated by syntax and other modules, and the interfaces between them, is essential to the viability of the minimalist goal of a maximally simple, efficient, pared-down theory of the syntactic component.

My work therefore generally concerns the interfaces between syntax and other components, primarily semantics. Specifically, I have worked on the formal and conceptual semantics of events and its implications for locality theory; patterns of scope reconstruction; the syntax and semantics of adjuncts and modification; and the internal syntax and semantics of noun phrases. Current research projects include syntactic abilities of nonhuman primates and the diachrony of the English relative clause system, and next on the list is a British Academy-funded attempt to partially divorce reconstruction from movement.

Current Teaching

L2A Syntax, Autumn 2009

Education and Previous Employment

2007-2008	Postdoctoral Associate, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University
2004-2007	PhD Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London
2002-2004	M.Phil General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, University of Oxford
1997-2001	BA(Hons.) Modern Languages, University of Oxford