My Principal Contributions to Syntactic Theory

I list my top contributions to syntactic theory. Each of these contributions is either a theoretical innovation and/or a major empirical discovery or exploration. The main criteria for inclusion in the list is: The subjective impact that they have already had on syntactic theory, or the potential impact. In other words, they are not chosen based on citation indices. They are listed roughly in order of subjective impact. 

I have worked on many other very interesting empirical problems including conjunction adverbs, relative clause deletion, negating quantifier phrases, neg-raising, pluractionality, verbal linkers, null prepositions, serial verb constructions, why versus how come, etc. All of these studies have been influential in their own way, in their own corner of the field, but they have more limited theoretical or empirical scope, so I do not include them in the list below.

1. Imposters (with Paul Postal)

Even though the DP 'yours truly' is third person singular, it refers to the speaker. Collins and Postal (2012) refer to this kind of DP as an imposter. The syntactic analysis presented there analyzes imposters as having an outer 'shell' an inner 'core', each having a distinct set of phi-features. The discovery and analysis of imposters has the potential to completely change how we view pronominal systems cross-linguistically.

2. Theory of Implicit Arguments

An implicit argument is an understood unexpressed argument. For example, if you say 'The book was written last year', it is understood that the book was written by somebody (or something in the case of a book written by AI). Implicit arguments have been recognized as an important part of syntactic theory since the seminal work of Tom Roeper. But most theories tend toward the idea of 'semantically present, syntactically absent.' I challenge all that with detailed and systematic evidence showing implicit arguments must be syntactically projected. The diagnostics that I developed have already been applied successfully in Buli, Ewe, Greek and Oshiwambo, in addition to English. My theory of implicit arguments has consequences for the analysis of the passive cross-linguistically, but also for general principles governing the syntax-semantic interface.

3. Smuggling Derivations

Locality of movement has been an important topic at least since Chomsky 1964 (LBLT), and Ross' 1967 thesis. Smuggling describes a way that locality constraints can be circumvented. A constituent X contained in Y is smuggled out of a locality constraint by movement of Y (Y is the smuggler). Since I proposed smuggling derivations in 2005 in the context of the derivation of the passive, they have become the focus of intense study from many corners, see collected papers in Belletti and Collins 2020.

4. Formalizing Minimalist Syntax (with Edward Stabler)

Minimalist syntax is formal theory of the syntactic aspects of the human capacity for language. In the past, discussions of subtle theoretic aspects of the theory often had a vague hand-wavy quality. My formalization with Edward Stabler has completely recast those discussions, making it possible to state hypotheses in a precise testable manner. For example, the formalization in Collins and Stabler 2016 has led to important theoretical discussions of the distinction between copies and repetitions, and the place of workspaces in syntactic derivations.

5. Quotative Inversion (with Phil Branigan)

In English, the subject usually precedes the main verb. But there is a systematic exception to this generalization with quotative inversion: "I am leaving." said John. In this example, the verb 'said' precedes the subject 'John'. In 1996, we gave a detailed analysis of the syntactic properties of quotative inversion, including the transitivity constraint. Since then, the transitivity constraint has become an important challenge for theories of locality and argument structure.

6. Eliminating Labels (Simplest Merge)

The original formulation of Merge produced a label: Merge(A,B) = {A, {A,B}}, where A is the label. I argued in Collins 1997 and Collins 2002 for simplest Merge, where Merge(A,B) = {A,B}. A different set of converging arguments for simplest Merge were given in Seely 2006. Since Chomsky 2013 (POP), simplest Merge has become the standard in minimalist syntax.

7. Morphology as Syntax (with Richard Kayne)

Morphology of syntax (MaS) is a research program that asks the question of whether morphological phenomena can be accounted for syntactically, without any reference to a morphological component.

Summary

Taken together these contributions reflect several consistent threads in my research. A major feature of my work is a commitment to deep empirical exploration of particular phenomena (e.g., imposters, quotative inversion), revealing new and interesting generalizations, connections to other languages, and surprising insights into the structure of the human language faculty. Equally important is a commitment to articulating highly syntactic analyses of various phenomena, and comparing them to alternative non-syntactic accounts (e.g., MaS). Lastly, my work is defined by a commitment to a deep understanding of the theoretical foundations of the field of natural language syntax. These three strands woven together define my contributions as a syntactician.