Blurbs/Praise for Principles of Argument Structure

“This carefully argued inquiry develops an original and persuasive Merge-based approach to fundamental questions about the syntactic foundations of semantic interpretation. A very valuable contribution to central issues in the study of language.”

Noam Chomsky

“Collins' stimulating new monograph delves into and sheds important new analytical light on some of the central questions in syntactic theory and will be essential reading on implicit arguments and the passive voice.”

Jason Merchant, 

Vice Provost and Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago

“A beautiful trip into the intricacies of the organization of the nominal arguments of verbs, sometimes silent, sometimes overt, developed in such a sharp way, that makes one feel that deep properties have indeed been uncovered. Collins' book illustrates the scientific method at its best, leaving a feeling of freshness and clarity.”

Adriana Belletti, 

University of Siena, Italy

 

Proposal: Ewe Dialect Map (Eʋe Kɔtagbewo ƒe Tata)

 Summary:

We propose to develop an interactive map of the Ewe (western Gbe) dialects of Ghana, Togo and Benin. The map will interface with a detailed database of morphosyntactic information about the Ewe dialects. The map will be freely available on the Internet. 

On Implicit Arguments and Logophoricity (Angelopoulos and Collins, poster for NELS 2024)

By combining Collins’s (to appear) theory of implicit arguments with

Charnavel’s (2019) theory of exempt anaphora, we explain crosslinguistic

variations in the distribution of exempt anaphors.

 Poster

How to Syntax 2 (Adverbs with Attributive Adjectives)

This is the second of a series of blog posts showing how I think about a syntax problem when I first notice it. For the first installment, see:

How to Syntax I (the now that-Construction)

I will occasionally choose phenomena that I notice, and talk about them in an informal fashion, breaking down the process of preliminary syntactic exploration. That is, I am just thinking off the top of my head (brainstorming), with few or no revisions. Ideally, I will give myself a time period of three hours maximum to prevent polishing. The focus of the discussion will be on process. I am not trying to come up with a polished analysis. 

Two Abstracts for: The Cambridge Handbook of the Minimalist Program (forthcoming, Grohmann and Leivada eds.)

I am very proud of both of these little squibs, which are both foundational. Erich Groat and Daniel Seely are two of the deepest thinkers about the foundations of minimalist syntax out there, and I am honored to have been able to work with them. Both of these papers follow closely on earlier results of mine, including Collins 2002 ('Eliminating Labels') and Collins and Stabler 2016 ('A Formaliation of Minimalist Syntax'). I am glad that they are finally going to see the light of day in Grohmann and Leivada's eagerly anticipated handbook.

Chomsky and Me Too: Review of Stohl 2023

(https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/chomsky-and-me/)

In this blog post, I review Bev Stohl’s memoir ‘Chomsky and Me’ (2023, OR Books) from my personal point of view, as a graduate student who attended the MIT Department of Linguistics from 1988 to 1993. To complement Stohl’s perspective, I describe some of my own experiences in the department, studying with Chomsky.

Harvard Society of Fellows Application (September 2 1992)

Application (September 2 1992)

At the end of graduate school, I applied for Harvard’s Society of Fellows. It was basically a three-year period where one could do any research one wanted, and interact with all kinds of very smart people. I knew Chomsky had been a fellow nearly forty years earlier, and that this fellowship allowed him the intellectual room to write his master piece the Language Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT, of which his dissertation is a chapter). I would have loved following in his footsteps. My application was all about economy of derivation and trying to develop it in various ways. I applied for the position, and told Morris Halle, who said to me something like: “No, you will never get it.” I was hurt by that comment, but he was just being realistic. I did not get the fellowship. 

Several MIT linguistics students subsequently went on to get the fellowship.