Best All-in-One Negation Package

The following papers all explore the issue of negating quantifier phrases. The topic is extremely rich, and has barely been scratched in the existing literature on negation and quantification (with the exception of "split scope" for which there exists a small literature). They all start from the assumption that it is possible to combine negation directly with a quantifier phrase: [NEG QP]. All of the papers were all written in the framework of Collins and Postal 2014. I do not include papers here on NEG Raising, which raises related but different issues.

Description of Ewe Repository

Ewe is a Gbe language, spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin in west Africa.

The Ewe Repository is a collection of articles and books on and in Ewe for serious Ewe scholars. As of today (June 13, 2019) it contains 289 files. It is not accessible publicly on the internet, although we are looking into creating an internet accessible version. If you are an Ewe scholar, and are interested in joining, the price of admission is to send me paper or book on or in Ewe that we do not already have. Then I will sign you up. Even if you do not want to be a member, if you have books or papers on or in Ewe, please send them to me.

Best All-in-One Ellipsis Package

The following papers all defend the claim that ellipsis is vastly more pervasive in English syntax than any current theory countenances. In fact, I view current theories to be excessively conservative. I also include my paper co-authored with Andrew Radford to illustrate the idea of ghosting (from Collins and Postal 2012).

Best All-in-One Morphology Package

This package is more of a promissory note, than a real package. I am not a morphologist, and have not done extensive work on morphology. That being said, I have very specific views on what a theory of morphology should be like. My basic point of view is derived from works such as Baker (1988) and Pollock (1989), and diverges radically from current theories of morphology in the DM and nano-syntax traditions.

The most extreme position one can take is: There is no morphological component in UG. In particular, there are no operations or processes or properties or representational primitives that play a role in accounting for morphological generalizations that are different from those found in the syntactic component. So that is the research agenda.

All of the papers here try to get at this way of looking at things in one way or the other. My views on morphology are most closely aligned to those of Richard Kayne (especially his recent papers), but also to those of people like Hilda Koopman and Judy Bernstein.

Best All-in-One Passive Package

I post here some links to recent papers that I have written on the passive. All these papers are written in the framework of Collins (2005). The main claim of that paper is adopted from Chomsky 1957 into modern terms: "...the external argument is merged into the structure in the passive in the same way as in the active." My recent papers explore and defend this claim. Collins (2005) and my recent papers run directly contra to most mainstream approaches to the passive (including those of Bruening, Legate and Alexiadou). Not all of the following papers are available on Lingbuzz.

The Power of Editors

This note was originally posted on Facebook on January 25, 2019. There have been some minor changes. I got some great feedback from Pauline J. on that post, in case readers are interested in pursuing what other people think. These notes are based on my experiences with journals, editors and reviewers over the last ten years or so. I want to emphasize here that I greatly appreciate the time that editors and reviewers put into their jobs.

Foreword to Postal 2010

This is the foreword to Paul Postal's 2010 MIT Press book "Edge-Based Clausal Syntax". Once again this will not be posted to Lingbuzz.

Two Conceptions of VoiceP

I wrote this paper during my seminar on argument structure in Fall 2018. The paper is fairly rough, and I could spend a lot of time getting the logic to be perfect. But I am leaving for Botswana on June 26 (2019), so I thought it was better to get it out there before I left.