borer@usc.edu

 

Taking as a starting point the study of the human language faculty within the generative approach, my research for the past 15 years spans three sub-areas of linguistics: comparative syntax, morphosyntax and language acquisition.  My study of inter-grammatical variation and comparative syntax led to the development of the hypothesis that this variation is reducible to the functional/ inflectional component.  This hypothesis, in turn, served as a starting point for the study of the functional/ inflectional system in general and its interaction with syntax in particular, therefore leading to the emergence of a morphosyntactic model.  From a different perspective, these hypotheses brought about the investigation of child language and the acquisition of grammatical knowledge.

In recent years, I have been pursuing an approach which shifts the computational load away from the lexical entry to the syntactic structure, subscribing to the view that an independent linguistic lexicon includes a minimal amount of structural information, and that it is structural constraints which determine traditionally lexical properties such as syntactic category type and argument structure.  I have pursued the consequences of that approach for morphosyntax, for language acquisition, and for the syntax-semantics interface.