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Program in
Linguistics University
of Florida |
contact info
| research interests
| selected papers | projects
| dissertation | courses
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Linguistics Department |
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office: (352) 392-0639 x232
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4121 Turlington |
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Selected Publications and Manuscripts |
Malagasy wh-questions
and
sluicing
Potsdam, Eric. 2007. Malagasy Sluicing and Its Consequences for the Identity Requirement on Ellipsis. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Potsdam, Eric. 2006. More
Concealed Pseudoclefts and the Clausal Typing Hypothesis.
Lingua 116, 2154-2182.
Potsdam, Eric. 2006. The Cleft Structure of Malagasy Wh-Questions. In Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law, and
Joachim Sabel (eds.). Clause Structure and Adjuncts in
Austronesian Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 195-232.
Backward Control and Malagasy Control
Potsdam, Eric and Maria Polinsky. 2007. Missing Complement Clause Subjects in Malagasy. Oceanic Linguistics 46, 277-308.
Polinsky, Maria and Eric
Potsdam. 2006. Expanding the Scope of Control and Raising. Syntax 9, 171-192.
Polinsky, Maria and Eric
Potsdam.
2003. Backward Control: Evidence from Malagasy. Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 19, 173-187.
Polinsky, Maria and Eric
Potsdam.
2002. Backward Control. Linguistic Inquiry 33, 24-282.
English syntax
Potsdam, Eric. in press. Analysing Word Order in the English Imperative. In Wim van der Wurff (ed.). Imperative Clauses in Generative Grammar: Studies Offered to Frits Beukema. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 111-128.
Potsdam, Eric. 1997. NegP
and
Subjunctive Complements in English. Linguistic Inquiry 28, 533-541.
Potsdam, Eric. 1997. English
Verbal Morphology and VP Ellipsis. In The Proceedings of the 27th
Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.Amherst, Ma.: GLSA, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst,
353-368.
Potsdam, Eric. 1995. Phrase
Structure of the English Imperative. In The Proceedings of the
Sixth
Annual Meeting of the Formal Linguistics Society of Midamerica. Bloomington: Indiana University
Linguistics
Club Publications, 143-154.
Projects
"Collaborative Research: Variation in Control Structures". This National Science Foundation-funded project is joint work with Maria Polinsky at the Unversity of California, San Diego. The project time period is March 2002 to August 2006.
Control constructions
have been at
the fore of syntactic and semantic theorizing for the last thirty
years, and
the research into the syntax and semantics of Control constructions has
led to
important results in the domain of clausal complementation. Most
theoretical
research on Control has built heavily on the facts of English and a
small
number of other well-studied, typologically similar languages. Such
theories of
Control account for the canonical English Control pattern, Sandy
tried _ to
remain calm.The
core
property of this construction is a Forward Control relation: an
obligatory
interpretational dependency between an overt argument NP and a lower
unpronounced argument in the complement clause. In the proposed study,
we will
investigate variation in the structural realization of this Control
relation
which we believe is cross-linguistically attested and which we also
believe has
important implications for syntactic theory. A Backward Control
relation is a
similar, obligatory interpretational dependency in which the overt
argument NP
is in the lower position and the higher argument is unpronounced.
Backward
Control has been proposed in the literature for constructions in
Japanese,
Brazilian Portuguese, Tsez (Nakh-Dagestanian), Korean, Malagasy, and
other
languages.
The goal of this project
is to
explore the empirical and theoretical issues surrounding Backward
Control
phenomena. In the empirical domain, we will further document Backward
Control constructions
cross-linguistically. We will carry out in-depth investigations of
attested
Backward Control structures across several selected languages and, with
the aid
of graduate and undergraduate research assistants, we will seek out
additional
examples and simultaneously develop a database of control patterns in
selected
language families. In the theoretical domain, we will examine the
implications
of our empirical findings for existing theories of Control and for
syntactic
theory more generally. Theoretical work will center on whether or not
current
theories permit the structures that we document and, if they do not,
what
modifications are necessary to permit the range of observed variation
while
still maintaining restrictiveness. Overall, the proposed project will
contribute to an understanding of the range of variation in Control
structures
that are attested in natural language.
Dissertation
My 1996 University of
California,
Santa Cruz dissertation "Syntactic Issues in the English Imperative"
investigates central syntactic issues in the English imperative clause
type.
The fundamental thesis is that the imperative has largely regular
syntactic
behavior within a conventional conception of English clause structure.
The work
uses independently motivated analyses of diverse syntactic phenomena
such as
adverb placement, VP ellipsis, negation, and floating quantifiers, as
well as
additional tools of modern syntactic theory, to analyze constituent
structure,
word order, and semantic restrictions in the imperative.
The work is published in
the series
Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics edited by Laurence Horn. Look
for it at a library near you:
Potsdam, Eric. 1998. Syntactic Issues in the English Imperative.New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Courses
Fall 2007 - Spring 2008
on leave
PREVIOUS COURSES
LIN
3010
Introduction to Linguistics
LIN 3460 Structure of Human Language
LIN
4400/6402
Introduction to Morphology
LIN 4500/6501
Introduction to Syntax
LIN 6165
Field Methods
LIN 6520
Issues in
Syntax
LIN
6932 Seminar in Syntax: The
Minimalist Program
Last Revised: October 1, 2007
