Internet Searches as a Tool in Syntactic Research (third version)

Internet searches have turned out to be a revolutionary tool in syntactic research. In this blog post, I outline the general methodology.

Internet Searches

Implicit Arguments at WCCFL 41 (2023)

The following abstracts concerning implicit arguments have been accepted to WCCFL 41:

On the Syntactic Status of Implicit Arguments in UG: Greek as a Case Study (Accepted WCCFL 41 2023 Abstract)

 The abstract below is a joint effort by our team, including (in alphabetical order):
Niko Angelopoulos, Chris Collins, Dimitris Michelioudakis and Arhonto Terzi.

On the Syntactic Status of Implicit Arguments: Greek as a Case Study

The Distribution of Particles in Quotative Inversion (Collins 2003)

In this paper , I revisit the analysis of Quotative Inversion (QI) presented in Collins (1997) (see also Collins and Branigan (1997), and see Doeleman 1998 and Suñer 2000 on QI in other languages). Based on the distribution of particles in QI, I will show that the […V Subj…] word order found in QI (quotative inversion) is the result of VP movement to a position c-commanding the in-situ Subj. The distribution of particles provides direct evidence against the verb movement analysis of QI given in Collins 1997.

The Distribution of Particles in Quotative Inversion

Head-Raising from Collins 2015 (Grammatical Analysis II)

 Here is a handout on the head-raising analysis of relative clauses, based on Collins 2015.

It just gives the tree diagram for a simple example.

Head-Raising Analysis

Internet Searches as a Tool in Syntactic Research (second version)

Motivation

Collins and Postal (2012, 2014) contain lots of data obtained from Internet searches. Such data is also cited extensively in chapters 2 and 3 of my forthcoming monograph “Principles of Argument Structure: A Merge Based Approach”. In this blog post, I offer a few guidelines on using such data in syntactic research.

The Use of the Internet as a Natural Language Corpus in Syntactic Research

Motivation

Collins and Postal (2012, 2014) contain a large amount of data obtained from Internet searches. Similarly, such data is cited extensively in chapters 2 and 3 from my forthcoming monograph “Principles of Argument Structure: A Merge Based Approach”.