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My research belongs to a recent tradition that seeks to build a
theory of universal grammar on a broad database, free of anglocentrism,
and to find out empirically what kinds of formalism can best reveal
and explain the regularities that run through the world's languages.
This line of research, based in relational grammar, in unconventional
in that it envisions non-spatial representations of abstract syntatic
structure. My current work centers on the typology of morphosyntatic
rules and the serialization of clausemate predicates, a topic which
bears on such areas as auxilliaries, modals, and many constructions
expressing causation, possession, and predication. Home base for
me is the Romance language family, especially Italian. I regularly
teach historical and comparative Romance linguistics, an old discipline
now strikingly renewed by current theoretical approaches. |
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