Concept Map of My Work (Some Reflections)

Concept Map

This concept map represents the intellectual work of my entire career as a syntactician. It is grouped into five areas: Foundations/Formalization, African Fieldwork (Ewe and Khoisan), Natural Language Logic, Argument Structure and Imposters. In this post, I will sketch briefly the intellectual origin of each of these areas of interest.

My interest in Ewe started when I was in the Peace Corps in Togo (1985-1987). I had taken enough syntax by then (as an MIT undergraduate) to start to look at Ewe through the eyes of a syntactician.  One of the topics that caught my eye, when I was trying to learn to speak Ewe, was the serial verb construction (SVC). In fact, my writing sample on SVCs for the MIT Department of Linguistics was something I had written during the Peace Corps.

The Khoisan portion of the concept map is ultimately due solely to my encounters with Jeff Gruber while I was in graduate school at MIT. At that time, he was a visiting scholar, so we overlapped. We had long talks about his work on theta-theory, and especially about his fieldwork in Botswana on the Khoisan languages. He graciously made available to me all of his Khoisan fieldwork materials (including reel to reel tapes). Because of Jeff, I became a Khoisanist.

The Negation and Imposters subareas of the concept map originated during my time at NYU, after I left Cornell in 2006. I became interested in working on these topics because of conversations with Paul Postal, who was affiliated with NYU at the time. We worked together extensively for over a decade. I have often reflected that my collaboration with him was a second graduate school education in syntax because I learned so much.

We first got interested in the word ‘ass’ in expressions like ‘Your ass is crazy.’ We started talking about it in early 2006 (just after I was hired). Our first paper together was Collins, Moody and Postal (2008) published just a few years later. That topic naturally led into imposters, and culminated in an MIT Press monograph Collins and Postal (2012). For Paul, those works were just a hiatus from his true obsession, which was negation. So after we finished working on camouflage and imposters, he invited me to help him with his project on negation, which ultimately led to the MIT Press monograph Collins and Postal (2014).

A hypothetical question is what would have happened if I had remained at Cornell, and not met Paul Postal. It seems unlikely that I would have ever worked on camouflage or imposters or negation. But I might have looked at some other problems in anaphora or the syntax/semantics interface. After all, Molly Diesing was at Cornell, and I studied her work very closely while I was there. Furthermore, logic and formal semantics have been interests of mine for a long time.

As for argument structure, that was one of the big topics in the intellectual atmosphere when I got to graduate school in 1988. One of my first graduate courses was Richard Larson’s seminar on VP shells, which had a deep impact on me. Soon after his paper on double object constructions appeared, Hale and Keyser started writing about argument structure (developing Larson’s framework, and modifying it) and so did Noam Chomsky, David Pesetsky and Howard Lasnik (in effect, all of the syntacticians at MIT were working intensely on argument structure around then). Almost overnight, the subfield of ‘argument structure’ transformed from a collection of odd statements about conceptual structure and subcategorization frames and mapping principles, to discussions with highly ramified syntactic structures!

In that climate, I also started working on argument structure, including my thesis work on serial verb constructions, a fairly influential paper on double object constructions in Icelandic (in collaboration with Hoski Thrainsson) and a paper on quotative inversion (in collaboration with Phil Branigan). My basic operating procedure in those years was to see how syntactic principles of locality of movement interact with assumptions about the projection of arguments. That kind of methodology eventually led to my theory of smuggling, which has played an important role throughout my career.

My work on negation, imposters, ellipsis and the interpretation of implicit arguments are all core topics in the syntax/semantics interface, which has occupied much of my career. My attraction to these issues is probably related to my long-time interest in the relation between language and mind (see my graduate school statement of purpose on my blog). 

It is without a doubt that my courses and meetings with Noam Chomsky led to my interest in the foundations of minimalism. In almost all the cases, my innovations have built on his ideas in some way or the other. Chomsky’s lectures taught me what it is to build a theory of natural language syntax, in part by subjecting standard assumptions to intense criticism in a way that I found to be exciting and liberating.

The one area in the foundations section of the concept map which is not directly related to Noam Chomsky’s work is the theory of Morphology as Syntax (Mas), which I created together with Richard Kayne of NYU. After decades of living in the epicenter of Distributed Morphology, I decided to stop grumbling to myself. Rather, I wanted to state clearly what I found to be the problematic aspects of that framework, proposing an alternative framework. Somewhat unexpectedly, I learned that Richard Kayne at NYU had ideas similar to my own, so we decided to collaborate around January 2012. After over a decade of discussions and correspondence, we finally published our foundational paper in 2023. Once again, had I not moved to NYU, it is doubtful that I would have worked on MaS.