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« Roumi Pancheva Talk | Main | Tanya Reinhart Obituary»

The Syntax Guru has Arrived

From Kyle:

I'm happy to announce that Roumyana Pancheva, this year's Syntax Guru, has arrived to South College where she will be in residence until the end of April. You can find her in Barbara's office.

Professor Pancheva has been on the faculty at the University of Southern California since the completion of her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. She is an expert on an interesting array of subjects in syntax, semantics and neuro-linguistics.

Her dissertation not only studied the free relative in all its glory but discovered much of its glory. It argues that the constrained form of the free relative nonetheless allows it to function in a dizzying array of constructions, including comparatives, concessives and correlatives. She has authored a large body of work on comparatives, conditionals, concessives and correlatives that builds on her dissertation work. In an important paper with Rajesh Bhatt, she has even found the free relative form in conditional sentences (e.g, "If this is a free relative, then it's heavily disguised").

She has also worked on the perfect participle, and its relation to tense, modality and aspect. In a series of interesting papers, one with Arnim von Stechow, she has provided a solution to the so-called present perfect puzzle, which is the name given to the observation that temporal adverbials of a certain sort cannot modify perfects when they are in the present tense (*She has danced yesterday) but can otherwise (She must have danced yesterday). In many closely related languages --- German and Italian for instance --- the present perfect is not constrained in this way. She argues that what makes English different is not the meaning of the perfect, but rather how the meanings of present and past tense are carved out in English as opposed to German or Italian. She has explored how the perfect varies in its form and meaning across a wide range of languages and shown how in some languages, Turkish for example, it can (surprisingly!) have a meaning like that of an evidential.

She has also done extensive work on clitics, especially in the Balkan sprachbund. Some of this work has been diachronic in nature: a good example is her 2005 Natural Language and Linguistic Theory paper in which she chronicles the rise of a second-position clitic in Bulgarian from postverbal clitics. In this work she also argues for a model of clitic placement that divorces it from strictly prosodic, or other phonological, controls, bucking a popular trend in this arena. She is presently working on an NSF project The Historical Syntax of Medieval South Slavic.

And finally, in collaboration with colleagues at USC, she has worked on certain aphasias and on fMRI studies that distinguish semantic anomalies from syntactic ill-formedness. She is presently involved in a study funded by USC's Zumberge Research and Innovation grant that is investigating the fMRI patterns associated with distinguishing weak and strong nominals in the positions that they are licensed.

You can learn more about her research, download some of her papers, and find out what she looks like at her website.

Don't hesitate to get the guru's help on your work --- she's only here for one month!

March 29, 2007 12:13 AM | 05:08 (2007-03-29) , visiting scholars