How to Cite This Blog

Doing syntactic research includes acknowledging ideas that you get from informal sources, such as blog posts, talks, conversations, etc. If you find ideas on this blog useful in your own work, please cite the relevant blog post. 

Minimalist Syntax and the Many Faces of Recursion

This blog post summarizes the confusing web of concepts associated with recursion, and comments on how they are related to each other. In particular, I will show how each of the concepts relates to the minimalist structure building operation Merge.

Ghanaian versus Togolese Ewe (prepublication draft May 21 2026)

Abstract

Based on a survey of some Ghanaian and Togolese dialects of Ewe, this paper shows that there are features that distinguish dialects of Ewe spoken in Ghana from dialects of Ewe spoken in Togo. These features include lexical items, syntactic constructions, pragmatic uses of certain expressions and a hand gesture. Because of these systematic differences, Ewe dialects spoken in Ghana are collectively referred to as Ghanaian Ewe, and those in Togo are collectively referred to as Togolese Ewe. 

Edits to Preliminary Kpelegbe Dictionary

The original version of the Kpelegbe dictionary was a set of hand-written fieldnotes from the early 90s, meant to provide me with a tool for my syntactic analyses at the time. It was arranged by tonal category (e.g., L.LH).  During this last academic year (2025-2026), I wrote up those notes into a word file, and gave it to Zach to translate into a FLEx project, which is much easier to work with in creating dictionaries. That initial process is outlined here:

Fieldwork Starter Kit

This blog post is for people who are heading off on their first big fieldwork expedition, and just want a few pointers to get started. The advice is oriented toward syntactic fieldwork, but in most cases is more general.

The First Field Trip: 10 Pieces of Advice.

Worksheet for Syntactic Fieldwork

Audio Recording a Fieldwork Session

Recording onto Your Computer

Capturing Oral Texts

Basic Consultant Skills for Linguistic Fieldwork

Backup Workflow for Linguistic Fieldwork

Basic Skills in Syntax (Part 1): Working with Syntactic Data

There are many different concrete skills that students learn in an undergraduate syntax course. We can divide them into (at least) four groups.

a. Skills involving working with syntactic data. 

b. Skills involving tree drawing. 

c. Skills involving formulating and testing hypotheses.

d. Skills involving applying theoretical principles to data (e.g., the Binding Theory). 

Of course, there is not always a clear line between these categories, but they are a good starting point for the discussion. In this blog post, I take up the first category, skills involving working with syntactic data. In future blog posts, I will take up the other categories.

Managing Stress at Work

 Stress is a person’s physical and psychological response to challenging or difficult circumstances. For example, you may be experiencing a professional or personal conflict on the job. Or perhaps you have been turned down for a job or promotion. Or perhaps you have a huge deadline approaching, and feel you cannot manage. We all encounter such stressful situations. Here are a few tips, based on my own experience, to help you manage your reactions to them.