I am interested primarily in the syntax-semantics interface, and my research over the years has covered many different topics within that area, mostly based on my fieldwork on the languages of Scottish Gaelic and Bengali. Aspect and predication remain deep preoccupations, however. For a list of papers and publications, see my CV .

The following are recent research papers written by myself or with coauthors that are available in ms. form for .pdf download, together with brief descriptions of their content. Comments and criticisms most welcome!

Recent Research Papers for Download

Time and the Event: the Semantics of Russian Prefixes by Gillian Ramchand

This is a draft of the paper I gave at the Workshop on Tense, Aspect and Modality at GLOW 2004 in Thessaloniki. It is a longer and much wordier version of the handout I had then.

First Phase Syntax by Gillian Ramchand

This is the most up to date draft of a ms. that pulls together the material I have been working on most recently concerning aspect, argument structure and the nature of lexical information. It argues that the `first phase' of syntactic derivation is a sequence of category heads that are systematically interpreted to build up event structure meanings. Lexical items contain no argument structure information, just category labels which allow them to associate their lexical encyclopaedic content with the structural semantics given by the linguistic computational system. Warning: long!

Predication and Equation by David Adger and Gillian Ramchand

This is a draft of a paper (draft:2001) on the syntax and semantics of copular constructions in Scottish Gaelic, in which David and I argue that even so-called equational sentences are constructed on the basis of an asymmetrical syntactic and predicational structure.

Merge vs. Move: Wh-Dependencies Revisited by David Adger and Gillian Ramchand

This is the most up to date and expanded version of our paper on Scottish Gaelic relatives, where we give a non-movement account of long distance dependencies in Scottish Gaelic relative clauses crucially using the notions of AGREE, locality of derivation due to phases, and the pairing of interpretable/uninterpretable features. We presented this paper at the Workshop on `On Wh-Movement' in Leiden in December 2002.

The Lexical Syntax and Lexical Semantics of the Verb Particle Construction by Gillian Ramchand and Peter Svenonius

This is the copy of our paper delivered at WCCFL 21.

Prepositions and Results in Italian and English: An Analysis from Event Decomposition by Raffaella Folli and Gillian Ramchand

This is the prepublication version of a paper coauthored with Raffaella Folli on constructing telicity in path of motion constructions. We use the semantics of event decomposition to try to correlate the combinatoric possibilities of English and Italian with their syntactic and lexical resources/parameters. This paper is to appear in the Kluwer volume that is being published based on the Aspect Conference in Utrecht in December 2001

Complex Aspectual Structure in Hindi/Urdu by Miriam Butt and Gillian Ramchand

This is a paper to be published in an OUP volume on the syntax of aspect. It deals with complex predicates in Hindi/Urdu. We decompose basic verbal event structure into (maximally) three projections: InitiationPhrase, ProcessPhrase and ResultPhrase. We argue that the morphosyntax and semantics of complex predicates in Hindi/Urdu provides overt evidence for precisely these three projections in the syntax.

Two Types of Negation in Bengali by Gillian Ramchand

This is a draft of a paper (ms. 2001) I have been working on for ages on the puzzle of the two morphosyntactically distinct negation markers in Bengali. I end up arguing that the two markers are actually logically distinct as well, with one marker functioning to bind the external time variable of the proposition, while the other being pure event negation. This paper will appear in a volume Clause Structure in South Asian Languages published by Kluwer (edited by A. Mahajan and V. Srivastav).

Gillian Ramchand/gillian.ramchand@hum.uit.no/last updated April 2004