Professor and Senior Researcher
CASTL,
Department of Linguistics,
Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education
University of Tromsø
N-9037 Tromsø, NORWAY
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Office: E2012
(+47) 776 45408
fax: (+47) 776 45625
e-mail: peter.svenonius
"alfakrøll" uit.no
CV
Blog
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I am a
theoretical linguist at CASTL (the Center for Advanced Study in
Theoretical Linguistics – A Norwegian Center of Excellence).
My research covers many areas in linguistic theory,
especially syntax and its interfaces with systems for
morphophonological and lexical expression on the one hand and with
systems for conceptual and intentional semantic meaning on the other.
On
the one interface, I explore the nature of ‘Spell-out’, the
relationship between syntactic structures in the mind and their
observable manifestation. Two recent developments in this area are the
lexical insertion theory of spanning which is designed to handle words
and concatenative morphology, and a phonological theory of nonconcatenative
morphology (developed together with Patrik Bye) which
is designed to handle the residue. The spanning theory is related to
Distributed Morphology and to the Nanosyntax
theory which is being developed here at CASTL.
On the other interface, I have been working on the extent to which
syntactic cartography can be derived from properties of the meaning
systems with which syntax interfaces. One development here is a
semantically informed cartography of spatial adpositions, and another
is a way
of limiting the amount of semantics that must be encoded in
the syntactic representations (developed together with Gillian
Ramchand).
Spring
2012: Seminar on Categories, Tromsø. This spring I am running a
graduate seminar (about eight PhD students attend, plus about another
six colleagues with PhDs). The seminar explores the relationship of
“narrow syntax” (NS, the bare-bones computational system responsible
for syntactic structure in its abstract outlines) and semantics (CI,
the conceptual-intentional systems).
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phase: Minimalist theory. Rationale for the SMT; Beyond Explanatory
Adequacy, Three Factors of Language Design. Merge, Edge Features,
Agree. Phases, Inheritance, the Duality of Semantics.
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Second phase:
Exploring the
interface between NS and CI. The “Duality of Semantics”. The
relationship of thematic- evental meaning to intentional-
quantificational meaning, and the relationship of those to discourse
packaging.
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Research projects
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A
five-year project investigating expressions of direction and motion.
The main focus is on adpositions, cross-linguistically. This ties in
with my previous research on Germanic particles and Slavic prefixes.
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A
five-year project investigating variation across the Scandinavian
dialect continuum. The project is a Nordic Center of Excellence, in
collaboration with Århus, Trondheim, Oslo, Reykjavík, Helsinki, and
Lund. |
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Past
syntax conferences in Tromsø
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