As a generative linguist and syntactician, I share the general outlook established since the 1950's that the goal of syntactic research into the nature of the language faculty is to understand the nature of syntax as it is determined by Universal Grammar. My particular research foci have been, and continue to be, on the contribution of syntactic form to semantic interpretation, on the one hand, and on the nature of the linguistic typology made available by the innate language faculty.

Most of my work in the 1990s explored the theoretical and empirical issues that arise when syntactic factors condition the interpretation of anaphora. From EST through to Minimalism, the syntactic locality conditions that limit the distribution of anaphors and pronouns have played a major role in the design of successive theories. I have argued in my two recent books, The Syntax of Anaphora and The Syntax of (In)Dependence, that the principles discovered in the study of anaphora not only place significant boundary conditions on what a plausible theory of UG can contain, but provide insight into the internal architecture of UG. For example, I have argued on the basis of my research that competitive algorithms play an important but modular role in UG, regulating the possible interpretations that a given convergent derivation can have. (Competitive algorithms of the sort I propose optimize numerations that lead to convergence with respect to a constant dependent interpretation). Since anaphora, in the most general sense, crucially involves interpretation and discourse, my research has inevitably lead to hypotheses about the division of labor between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as the architecture of syntactic theory itself (and I shall return to this topic in forthcoming work tentatively entitled “Coconstrual and narrow syntax”). One of my current projects, a book manuscript tentatively entitled Person, Perspective and Anaphora, explores the principles behind logophoric anaphora and coconstrual between forms achieved by person marking.

The range of anaphora phenomena I have explored in the last decade is extensive, including the locality, morphology, and typology of pronouns and anaphors as well as their possible interpretations, including bound variable, de se, indistinctness, proxy, guise and reciprocal interpretations and various combinations of these, and also the distribution of non-local anaphora relations, including dependent and bound variable interpretations in logophoric contexts, ellipsis constructions, in reconstruction and antireconstruction contexts with consequences for the distribution of crossover phenomena and exceptional instances of non-locality. Since all of these phenomena are closely interconnected to other phenomena in the languages they are found (such as relative clause formation, question formation, topicalization, focalization and grammatical function shifts), any study that addresses these issues inevitably involves rich structural assumptions about the nature of structures in grammar, both universal and particular. Although I remain interested in a variety of phenomena that my research interests may turn to in the future, I do not think that what we understand of anaphora is in any way complete and I expect to remain involved in anaphora research for years to come (my most recent papers concern ellipsis, indexicality, person, and presuppositional restrictions on variables)

My interest in theoretically informed linguistic typology extends back to my earliest work on null subject languages and has persisted as a theme in much of my work. I do not consider myself a language area specialist, although I have participated for many years in the community of theoretically oriented linguists who have focused their attention on the Germanic languages (I was a founder and Co-editor in Chief of The German Generative Sytnax Newsletter for nine years and from 1997-2005 I served as Co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics). Earlier in my career, I also wrote extensively on Romance languages. My work on anaphora over the last ten years has involved some particular hypotheses about the nature of possible linguistic variation in the distribution of anaphoric readings, some of which were explored in The Syntax of Anaphora.

However, I have recently turned my attention to the close study of anaphoric systems in the non-colonial languages of Africa. The work on African languages receives ongoing support from NSF grants BCS-0303447 and BCS-0523102 and is part of a more general attempt to build an interactive research platform for the investigation of rich data on the form and interpretation of linguistic data on anaphora and, eventually, other topics, employing native speaker linguists as consultants and collaborators. Although we have been building the Afranaph web site for the last three years and we have only collected data on about 15 languages at this writing (2006), we are still at the beginning of what we expect to be a perennial project. I have not yet written about these languages, other than short descriptive essays on our site, but I expect that the African data and our African collaborators will be an important source of inspiration for my future work.

(Last update, April, 2006).