Research

My linguistics research focuses on syntax and morphology, looking at how these aspects of the grammar can change over time, and how these changes can be formally modelled. I have a particular interest in the Romance languages, including Portuguese.

My DPhil thesis applies the formal theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) to diachronic data, looking at case studies from Portuguese, including double past participles and innovative subject pronoun forms. One research strand provides an integration of the formal morphological theory of Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) with the existing LFG architecture, to enable more sophisticated analysis of complex morphosyntactic phenomena. Please contact me if you would like a copy of the thesis.

For a brief introduction to my research combining PFM with LFG, have a look at the 5-minute video I made for the LFG20 conference. You can also download a PDF handout of the slides.

I have experience of collecting various types of data, from recording and transcribing a 55,000 word corpus of 20 structured interviews, to running Likert-scale acceptability judgement tasks and forced-choice experiments. My current theoretical work is grounded in evidence from large-scale corpora, both synchronic and historical.

I am particularly interested in the 'double past participle' phenomenon in the Romance languages. Double past participle verbs are those which appear to have two different past participle forms, whose use may be conditioned by various grammatical or other factors. My master's thesis looked at this phenomenon in several Romance languages, with an emphasis on European Portuguese, giving both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. I presented a version of this work at the ACTL (Advanced Core Training in Linguistics) Summer School in 2018 as a poster. I also presented the results of my diachronic study at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics in 2019. You can download a copy of the handout for that talk.

During my Master's I also worked on the grammaticalisation of personal pronouns from nominal sources or other pronouns, looking at the ways in which the grammatical features of these forms can change, and developing an LFG analysis using the features index and concord. I presented a poster of this work at the LFG conference in 2019.

Another research theme is the realisation of object pronouns in Portuguese, focusing on the alternation between null and overt pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese. I first began this work as an undergraduate and have continued to work on this area intermittently. A recent article on this subject, titled 'Multiple factors in the licensing of null arguments: Null Objects in Brazilian Portuguese' was awarded the runner's-up prize in the Philological Society's 2021 R. H. Robins Prize. I also presented a poster on this topic in 2017 at the Debrecen workshop on pronouns.