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« Syntax Reading Group Today | Main | Jason Merchant Colloquium»

Syntax Guru: Jason Merchant

From Kyle Johnson, Guru of Gurus:

This year's syntax guru arrived Tuesday, April 1, and will stay with us until April 15.

He is Jason Merchant, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. Jason is known best, perhaps, for his work on Sluicing — a construction that he literally wrote the book on. That book, published in 2001, focuses on the island relieving property of Sluicing, and outlines an ambitious project that tracks this property back to slight mismatches which arise between sluices and their antecedents. It inspired a slew of papers and dissertations on islands, sluicing and ellipsis. He followed up this book with cross-linguistic work on Sluicing, including two influential papers on sluicing in Greek, and research on "fragment answers," which he shows to have a syntax and semantics related to Sluices. In a paper that has circulated for some time, he also uses Sluicing to reveal an effect that he explains with an OT-style violable constraint on ellipsis (MAX ELIDE) that has generated considerable interest in the ellipsis community.

Unsurprisingly, he has worked on other forms of ellipsis as well. His important paper with Chris Kennedy on attributive comparative deletion (published in NLLT in 2000) kicked off another line of papers and dissertations, and continues to influence work on this construction. His pair of papers on Antecedent Condition Deletion in the journals Syntax and Linguistic Inquiry zero in on an intriguing problem for the standard accounts of this construction. And in the last year or two, he has been investigating why certain forms of ellipsis (VPE, for instance) allow mismatches between the voice of the elided phrase and the voice of its antecedent, while other forms of ellipsis (Pseudogapping, Gapping and Sluicing) don't.

You can learn more about his work, his interests, and his face, from his webpage.

As those of you familiar with his publications will know, Jason's polyglotism enriches his work with a useful comparative dimension. He has a surprisingly complete grasp of how islands and ellipses vary cross-linguistically. He also has a surprisingly complete grip on the syntax canon. He is among the best read syntacticians I know. He will be hanging out in Barbara's office, on the third floor. His time with us is short; be sure to use him early and often.

[Thanks Kyle!]

April 3, 2008 12:09 AM | 06:11 (2008-04-03) , visiting scholars