Current PhD projects in Theoretical and Empirical Linguistics

Documentation for the early West Germanic languages

Adverbs of degree (boosters like very and downtoners like hardly) make up an important part of the lexicon of most languages. Their usage is bound by a variety of restrictions, and they are highly prone to undergo change in usage, though this may be a relatively recent phenomenon. While their usage has been documented for the Modern Germanic languages, their historical counterparts have not yet had a systematic description. This project will provide documentation for the early West Germanic languages, and it will determine their rate of change in these languages, which will contribute to the study of lexical evolution.

Design a minimalist version of the Theta Theory

The relationship between predicates and their arguments is traditionally captured in Chomsky’s Theta Theory (1981), although many other versions of this theory have been proposed since then. These traditional accounts rely heavily on additional mechanisms outside of narrow syntax. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993; 1995) aims to provide a framework that is as simple and elegant as possible. As such, the only mechanism to create dependencies, (e.g. the dependency between predicates and arguments) is Merge. Merge is an operation that orders elements into a hierarchical structure (Zwart 2009; 2017). In the present project I aim to design a minimalist version of the Theta Theory, where argument structure is a function of Merge.

My project investigates whether lexical stress is a relevant factor in the distribution of phonemes. We compared the distribution of consonants in Spanish, English and Dutch words that start with either a stressed or an unstressed syllable, and the results undeniably show different distributional patterns for the two word types.

Columbia School Phonology (Diver 2012) uses the concept of word recognition to explain distributional patterns, and t he explanation of our results is based on the premise that stress information from the first syllable of a word facilitates word recognition in Spanish, English and Dutch. There is empirical evidence supporting this claim for English and Dutch (Cooper, Cutler & Wales 2002; Van Heuven 1988) , but but not for Spanish yet.

Therefore, we will carry out an adjusted replication of the Spanish word recognition experiment in Soto-Faraco, Sebastián-Gallés and Cutler (2001), in which the disyllabic primes will be replaced with monosyllabic primes.

The cognitive representation of change-of-state events in speakers of different languages

We are very used to use our senses to perceive the continuum of events happing around us, however, what is the role of language in this cognitive process? Several studies about motion, agency and labeling have found that language is especially important for increasing the salience of particular world features in our mind. Our research aims to examine the influence of using language-specific structures on the cognitive processes involved in the visual perception and mental representation of change of state events across language speakers. To investigate this, two matters need to be observed: a) which linguistic patterns do speakers across languages typically use to describe change of state undergone by objects, and b) by virtue of which cognitive processes do humans apprehend changes of state in the world. The central question directing this project is: to what extent does being habituated to describe changes of state by means of language-specific structures influence the performance of the cognitive processes involved in representing change-of-state events? We are looking into how attention allocation, memory, categorization and segmentation processes of Spanish, Dutch and Mandarin speakers may vary in function of specific characteristics of their mother tongue.