You have spent a grueling year writing up your Qualifying Paper (QP) for your Ph.D. program. You have read and carefully studied dozens of papers preparing your QP. You have been having weekly, sometimes tense, meetings with your supervisor, and somewhat less frequent meetings with the other committee members. Now, you have a 70-page double-spaced QP, containing your analysis of X, resulting in a successful defense.
What are the next steps?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
