Research interests

To the homepage of Andrew Spencer

Titles of publications or unpublished papers are in quote marks and more details can be found in my list of recent publications.

The page consists of the following sections (with some overlap of content):

·        Possession-modification project (AHRC-funded)

 

·        Morphological theory

·        Verb semantics in Slavic, argument structure and nominalizations

·        Languages of the Former Soviet Union

Current work in progress

General

• Periphrasis (joint work with members of the Surrey Morphology Group and with Gergana Popova)
• Possession-modification. This is on-going research with Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS), following from a one-year AHRC-funded. We are investigating the relationship between attributive modifiers (canonical adjectives) and ‘possessive’ constructions of various types. Click here for details, downloads and so on.
• The concept of ‘case’ in paradigmatic/realizational models of morphosyntax.
• Morphology-syntax interface (some of this is with Louisa Sadler): An investigation of the relationship between morphological and syntactic exponence of functional features within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar
• Theory of morphosyntactic categories (including so-called ‘mixed categories’)
• Generalized Paradigm Function Morphology, an extension of the model of Stump (2001) to clitic systems, derivational morphology and other types of lexical relatedness, various morpheme ordering puzzles and so on. Part of this programme is an investigation into the nature and use of the (morphomic) stem concept.
• Clitics (with Ana Luís)

 Recent publications:

[Offprints for some papers are available by emailing me]

·        Factorizing lexical relatedness. In Susan Olsen (ed.) New Impulses in Word-Formation. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 133-172, 2010.

·        Realization-based morphosyntax: The German genitive. In Patrick O. Steinkrüger and Manfred Krifka. On Inflection. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 173-218, 2009.

·        ‘Does Hungarian have a case system?’ In G. Corbett & M.Noonan (eds) Case and Grammatical Relations. John Benjamins, 36-56, 2009.

·        The Oxford Handbook of Case. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Edited with A. Malchukov], 2009.

·        ‘Negation in Japanese: A case of morphosyntactic mismatch’. Lingua 118: 997–1017, 2008.

·        ‘Extending deponency: implications for morphological mismatches’. In Matthew Baerman, Greville C. Corbett, Dunstan Brown and Andrew Hippisley (eds). Deponency and morphological mismatches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 45—70, 2007.

·        ‘Morphological vs. syntactic case: Implications for morphosyntax’. In Leonid Kulikov, Andrej Malchukov and Peter de Swart (eds) Case, Valency and Transitivity. Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 3—21, 2006.

·        ‘Case in Hindi’. In Miriam Butt and Tracy H. King (eds.) Proceedings of LFG ’05. http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/10/lfg05.html, CSLI Publications, 429—446, 2005.

·        ‘Limits to case – a critical survey of the notion’. In Mengistu Amberber and Helen de Hoop (eds) Competition and variation in natural languages: the case for case. Dordrecht: Elsevier Publishers, 119—145, 2005. [With R. Otoguro].

·        ‘Towards a typology of “mixed categories”. In C. Orhan Orgun and Peter Sells (eds) Morphology and the Web of Grammar. Essays in Memory of Steven G. Lapointe. Stanford University: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 95—138, 2005.

·        ‘A Paradigm Function account of ‘mesoclisis’ in European Portuguese (EP)’. In Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds) Yearbook of Morphology 2004, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 177—228, 2005. [with A Luís].

·        Generalized Paradigm Function Morphology – A synopsis. In Alexandra Galani and Beck Sinar (eds) York Papers in Linguistics 2, issue 2, Papers from the York-Essex Morphology Meeting, 2003, 93—106, 2005.

·        ‘Putting some order into morphology: reflections on Rice (2000) and Stump (2001)’. Journal of Linguistics 39: 1—26, 2003.

·        ‘Does English have productive compounding?’ In Geert Booij, Janet DeCesaris, Angela Ralli and Sergio Scalise (eds.), Topics in Morphology. Selected papers from the Third Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (Barcelona, September 20—22, 2001), Barcelona: Institut Universitari de Lingüística Applicada, Universtitat Pompeu Fabra, 329—341, 2003.

·        ‘Periphrastic paradigms in Bulgarian’. In Uwe Junghanns & Luka Szucsich (eds.) Syntactic Structures and Morphological Information. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 249—282, 2003.

·        ‘A realizational approach to case’. In Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG03 Conference, University at Albany, State University of New York, July 2003. CSLI Publications, http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/, 2003

 

In 1998 I completed a three-year project funded by the ESRC (Project Reference R000236115) with Marina Zaretskaya. We have built up a database of Russian verbs, their argument structure properties and various aspects of their lexical semantics, loosely based on the work of Jackendoff, Levin and Rappaport Hovav, C. Smith, and especially the work of E. V. Paducheva and her collaborators in Moscow. (This project followed up a one-year ESRC-funded project with Louisa Sadler).

A short guide to the Russian database: [Word2000 version].

The full description of the original database can be found here [Word2000], [PostScript], [PostScript zipped]

This is also available in hard copy as Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 25.

This work has also formed the basis of a three year INTAS funded project (1997 – 2000), collaborating with Moscow colleagues who are developing a similar database (Leksikograf).

The research relates to a wider interest in the theory of argument structure. See: ‘Argument structure and morphology’ [With Louisa Sadler]

See the following papers:

• ‘Verb Prefixation in Russian as lexical subordination’ [With Marina Zaretskaya]

·         ‘Pri-prefixation in Russian’ [With Marina Zaretskaya]

• ‘Investigating argument structure: The Russian nominalization database’ [With Andrew Bredenkamp, Louisa Sadler]
• ‘A morphomic account of a syncretism in Russian’ [With Louisa Sadler and Marina Zaretskaya]

 Polish

• ‘Psychological predicates in Polish: Event Participants, Nominalizations and Mapping’. With Bozena Rozwadowska. In Zybatow et al., 2001.

Other work on Slavic

• ‘Periphrastic paradigms in Bulgarian’. In Uwe Junghanns & Luka Szucsich (eds.) Syntactic Structures and Morphological Information. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 249—282, 2003.
• ‘Gender as an inflectional category’. Journal of Linguistics 38: 279—312, 2002.

·        ‘The Word and Paradigm approach to morphosyntax’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 2001.

·        ‘Verbal clitics in Bulgarian - a Paradigm Function approach’. In Gerlach and Grijzenhout, 2000.

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Click here for a grammatical sketch of Chukchee (based on Skorik's two volume grammar).

My main languages of interest outside Slavic are those of the Chukotkan group (Chukchee-Kamchadal), especially Chukchee. Papers which discuss material from this language group are:

• ‘Chukchee and Polysynthesis’
• ‘Comments on paper by Borer’
• ‘Incorporation in Chukchi’
• ‘Agreement morphology in Chukotkan’

Brief remarks relating to Archi (Dagestanian) can be found in: ‘Inflectional morphology and functional heads’

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Last updated 14 December, 2010

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