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Hagit Borer Professor of Linguistics |
Contact: Department of Linguistics,
SLLF Queen Mary University of
London +44(0)20 7882 5740 h.borer at QMUL dot AC dot UK |
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Taking as a starting point the study of the
human language faculty within the generative approach, my research for the
past 30 years spans three sub-areas of linguistics: comparative syntax,
morphosyntax and language acquisition. |
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My study of
inter-grammatical variation and comparative syntax led to the development of
the hypothesis that this variation is reducible to the
functional/inflectional component. This hypothesis, in turn, served as
a starting point for the study of the functional/inflectional system in
general and its interaction with syntax in particular, therefore leading to
the emergence of a morphosyntactic model. From a different perspective,
these hypotheses brought about the investigation of child language and the
acquisition of grammatical knowledge. In recent years,
I have been pursuing an approach which shifts the computational load away
from the lexical entry to the syntactic structure, subscribing to the view
that an independent linguistic lexicon includes a minimal amount of
structural information, and that it is structural constraints which determine
traditionally lexical properties such as syntactic category type and argument
structure. I have pursued the consequences of that approach for morphosyntax,
for language acquisition, and for the syntax-semantics interface. |
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