Robert Truswell

Center for Cognitive Studies
11 Miner Hall
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155

myfirstname.mylastname at myuniversity'sname.edu

Education

2004-2007	PhD Phonetics and Linguistics, University College, London
2002-2004	M.Phil General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, University of Oxford
1997-2001	BA(Hons.) Modern Languages, University of Oxford

Research Interests

A fully acceptable utterance is one that satisfies all the constraints placed upon it by various linguistically-related components, from phonology through morphosyntax and semantics to our pragmatic knowledge and conceptual representation of the world. When we find an utterance degraded, we know that some constraint, somewhere along the line, was not satisfied, but we have no way, a priori, of knowing what that constraint is, or which linguistic component it comes from. I believe that many current theories attribute more of these wellformedness constraints to the syntactic component than they should, and that a clearer understanding of the structures generated by syntax and other modules, and the interfaces between them, is essential to the viability of the minimalist goal of a maximally simple, efficient, pared-down theory of the syntactic component. My work therefore generally concerns the interfaces between syntax and other components, primarily semantics. Specifically, I have worked on the syntax and semantics of adjuncts and modification; the internal syntax and semantics of noun phrases; locality theory; reconstruction and connectedness; and the formal and conceptual semantics related to events.

Publications and Downloadable Papers

(In preparation)	Constituency and Bonobo Comprehension. Rough draft, comments very welcome.
(Submitted)	Preposition-stranding, Passivisation, and Extraction from Adjuncts in Germanic. Comments and suggestions very welcome.
(Submitted)	Tense, Events, and Extraction from Adjuncts. Submitted to Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
(Forthcoming)	A Semantic Constraint on Wh-Movement: Extended events and extraction from in order clauses. To appear in Proceedings of ConSOLE XV.
(Forthcoming)	Attributive Adjectives and Nominal Templates . To appear in Linguistic Inquiry.
(2007)	Extraction from Adjuncts and the Structure of Events. Lingua 117:1355-1377. Prepublication version here. Published version here (subscription required).
(2007)	Locality of Wh-movement and the Individuation of Events. Ph.D. thesis, University College London.
(2007)	The Interaction of Event Structure and Wh-movement. This is a short paper setting out the material I covered at the On Linguistic Interfaces workshop in Belfast.
(2006)	Reconstruction and Control (joint work with Ad Neeleman). A short unpublished squib, setting out a problem I hope to come back to one day...
(2006)	Adjectives and Headedness. In Anna McNay (ed.), Oxford Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, vol. 10:1-19.
(2006)	Phase Heads, Multiple Spell-Out, and a Typology of Islands. In Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Manchester Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics, pp.125-141.
(2005)	Non-restrictive Adjective Interpretation and Association with Focus. In Richard Ashdowne and Thomas Finbow (eds.), Oxford Working Papers in Linguistics, Phonetics and Philology , vol. 9:133-154.
(2004)	Attributive Adjectives and the Nominals they Modify. M.Phil thesis, University of Oxford.

Presentations

6/12/07	Tense, Events, and Extraction from Adjuncts. Ling-Lunch, MIT.
29/10/07	Referential Opacity and Extraction from Purpose Clauses. LF Reading Group, MIT.
27/9/07	Event Structure, Phrase Structure, and A'-Locality. Syntax Reading Group, UMass Amherst.
1-3/6/07	The Interaction of Event Structure and Wh-Movement. On Linguistic Interfaces, Belfast.
29/5/07	Events, Islands, and Cyclicity. Invited talk, Syntaxlab, University of Cambridge.
4/5/07	Locality of Movement and the Individuation of Events. Chicago Linguistic Society 43.
12/4/07	Locality of Movement and the Individuation of Events. GLOW XXX, Tromsø.
13/1/07	Locality of Movement and the Individuation of Events, ConSOLE XV, Brussels.
10/1/07	Against Syntactic Representation of Lexical Decomposition: Agentivity, aspectual classes, and the progressive, invited talk, Utrecht University.
30/11/06	Locality of Wh-Movement and the Individuation of Events, Linguistics Research Group, Queen Mary, University of London.
31/8/06	Event Structure and Extraction from Adjuncts, LAGB Annual Meeting, Newcastle.
23/6/06	Extraction from Adjuncts and the Interpretation of Secondary Predicates, 1st Newcastle Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.
2/6/06	Event Structure and Extraction from Adjuncts, Tabudag, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
27/4/06	Event Structure and Extraction from Adjuncts, UCL PhD Day 2006.
28/4/05	Adjective Orders and Nominal Templates, UCL PhD Day 2005.
18/3/05	Strong Islands and Phases at the Interfaces, CamLing 2005.
4/3/05	Strong Islands and Phases at the Interfaces, 13th Manchester Postgraduate Conference.