Presenters' Bios & Abstracts
Cedric Boeckx is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2001. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Illinois and Maryland. His research interests are in theoretical syntax, comparative grammar, and architectural questions of language, including its origins and its development in children and its neurobiological basis. He is the author of Islands and Chains (John Benjamins 2003) Linguistic Minimalism (OUP 2006), and Understanding Minimalist Syntax (Blackwell 2007); co-editor with Kleanthes K. Grohmann of Multiple Wh-fronting (John Benjamins 2003); and co-author with Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka of A Course in Minimalist Syntax (Blackwell 2005). He has published numerous articles in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Vicki Carstens received her PhD in linguistics from UCLA in 1991. She is an associate professor and chair of the interdepartmental linguistics program at the University of Missouri. Much of her work explores theoretical implications of grammatical agreement and word order phenomena in Eastern Bantu languages. Her articles have appeared in the journals Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Syntax, The Linguistic Review, and Language.
Sam Epstein has been a Professor of Linguistics at The University of Michigan since 1998. Before coming to Michigan he taught at Harvard University for 9 years. He has published his research in various professional journals (including Linguistic Inquiry, NLLT, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Language and Mind), He is co-founder of Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical Experimental and Interdisciplinary Research (Blackwell). He has also participated in numerous book projects, including co-author of A derivational Approach To Syntactic relations (With E. Groat, H Kitahara, and R. Kawashima, Oxford University Press 1988), co-editor of Working Minimalism (with N. Hornstein, MIT Press 1999), co-editor (with T.D. Seely of Derivation and explanation in the MP (2002 Blackwell ) and co-author (with T.D. Seely of Derivations in Minimalism (Cambridge 2006), He is also author of Essays in Syntactic theory (2000), published in the Routledge leading Linguists series.
John Hale is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University. His academic interests are in the fields of computational properties of the human language user. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Science from John Hopkins in 2003. His work on information-theoretical models of the human sentences processor received the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award and the EW Beth Dissertation Prize.
Hisatsugu Kitahara is Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies at Keio University, Japan and is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan for the academic years 2007-09. His research area is minimalist syntax, specifically a derivational approach to phrase structure (initially outlilned in Epstein et al. 1998 and advanced in Epstein and Seely 2006). He is also interested in foundational issues concerning the field of generative grammar.
Tommi Leung is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in United Arab Emirates University. He was graduated from the University of Southern California in 2007. His research interest focuses on the theoretical issues of syntax and phonology, and the relation between typology and linguistic theories. He is also interested in the mathematical and logical foundations of linguistic theories.
Mike Putnam is an Assistant Professor of German & Linguistics at Carson-Newman College. Prior to his current position at Carson-Newman College, he has held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan (2005-06) and a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Michigan State University (2006-07). He is a specialist in syntactic theory in relation to synchronic and diachronic Germanic languages and German speech enclaves, i.e. Sprachinseln. He is the author of Scrambling and the Survive Principle (Benjamins, 2007), in which he analyzes middle field scrambling in West Germanic languages in a derivational formalism that employs the Survive Principle. His currently research projects involve the notion of crash-proof grammars, parasitic gaps in Pennsylvania German, and Probe-Goal relationship (Agree) in minimalist theory. He is also interest in foundational issues in syntactic theory.
T. Daniel Seely is Professor of Linguistics at Eastern Michigan University. His research and teaching interests focus on biolinguistic theory, specifically on language as an “organ” of the human brain. Seely’s research has appeared in such journals as Syntax and Linguistic Inquiry; and he has a number of recent books with long-time collaborator Samuel Epstein (University of Michigan). Seely has also received a number of teaching awards including The Holman Outstanding Faculty, Classroom Instruction Award (2002); and the Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Teaching II Award, considered “the most prestigious award offered by the University (Eastern Michigan University) to an individual faculty member” (2004).
Tom Stroik is Professor of English linguistics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has published three books (Minimalism, scope, and VP structure, Sage Publications, 1996; Syntactic controversies, Lincom Europa, 2000; and Locality in minimalist syntax, MIT Press, forthcoming). His work has also been published in Linguistic Inquiry, Linguistics, Linguistic Analysis, Lingua, and The Linguistic Review, among others. One of his articles, "The Survive Principle" (Linguistic Analysis, 1999), paves the way for Survive-minimalism.
John R. te Velde is Professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Oklahoma State University, where he teaches a variety of courses related to the German language, culture and history. His current research deals with topics left unfinished in his book Deriving Coordinate Symmetries. A phase-based approach integrating Select, Merge, Copy and Match (Benjamins, 2005). Of these, solving derivational issues related to Select, Merge and Match in coordinate structures is the most immediate. Another on-going project involves the left periphery of Germanic languages and how the verb-second requirement should be formalized.
Takashi Toyoshima is Associate Professor in the Department of Human Sciences on the Faculty of Computer Science and Systems Engineering at Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan. He also holds a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Brain Science and Engineering. Takashi has held funded research positions in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (1994-95) and through the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (1994-97).
Sawada Tsuyoshi is currently a doctoral student in the department of linguistics at University of Connecticut. His research interests include: general linguistics, Japanese linguistics, syntax, morphology, and semantics. Current research topicsinclude: verbal morphology in Japanese, categorial features in Japanese, the status of adjectival-noun in Japanese, the structure of a relative clause with adjectival-noun as the main predicate, existential constructions in Japanese and other languages, usages of pleonastic morphemes, derivational theory of syntax.
Dong-Whee Yang is a professor of linguistics at Seoul National University, Korea. He is currently (2007-08) a visiting scholar at MIT working with Prof. Noam Chomsky on the notion of edge-feature movement. Prof. Yang looks forward to discussing how far the notion of edge-feature movement fits in the spirit of crash-proof grammars at this upcoming conference.
Jan-Wouter Zwart (Department of Linguistics, Groningen) is a specialist in theoretical syntax in relation with language typology, dialectology, and historical linguistics. Zwart studied classics and linguistics in Nijmegen and Groningen, and conducted his PhD-research in Groningen and at MIT (Cambridge, Mass.). His award winning 1993 dissertation Dutch syntax: a minimalist approach was the first book-length application of the minimalist program. He also wrote a follow-up study Morphosyntax of verb movement (Kluwer, 1996) as well as edited several volumes. He currently leads an NWO-funded research project investigating linguistic dependence as a function of the composition of syntactic structure.