T. S. Lowther

I am a graduate researcher studying for the DPhil in Linguistics at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, supported by a studentship from the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership (GUDTP) of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Currently associated with Wolfson College, I completed my MPhil in Linguistics at Balliol College, Oxford in 2022, after graduating from the BA in Philosophy, Psychology and Linguistics at University College, Oxford in 2020.

My primary research interests are in formal theories of language, focusing on syntax (how the structures of sentences are constrained), semantics (how meanings are computed), and the intersections thereof. My DPhil project, supervised by Dr. Louise Mycock, focuses on an analysis of bilingual code-switched sentences through the lens of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a non-derivational, constraint-based framework for generative grammar. My other projects include developing the theory of objecthood in LFG, given the problematic case of object-symmetric languages; and studying the role of discourse coherence in the semantic restrictions on pronominal anaphora, with a particular focus on providing a discourse-based solution to the problem of paycheck pronouns for dynamic theories of pronominal semantics.