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College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Linguistics
HomeFacultyRichard K. LarsonFilesCurrent Research Projects

Current Research Projects

I am currently pursuing the four main research projects described below. I welcome student & professional collaborators in any/all of these areas. (I also have smaller projects involving scope & kinship terms; feel free to ask about them!)

Constituency vs. Prosody

Certain distributional patterns in English VP Preposing & VP Ellipsis have long been analyzed as involving “adjunct stranding”. However, recent developments in syntactic & prosodic theory suggest they might better be analyzed terms of copy pronunciation. A prosodic re-analysis of VPP/VPE has important implications for VP structure, insofar as it removes one of the strongest arguments for VP adjuncts as right-adjoined elements. It also has implications  for our understanding of the Syntax ⇔ Information Structure mapping.

In this project I am experimentally investigating the prosodic patterns of VPP and VPE given specific manipulations of the informational context and various “strandings” & “doublings” of VP material that these manipulations enable (or fail to).

 Languages Studied in this Project:  English 

Papers/Presentations/Chapters

      • 2024 Larson R.K. VP preposing and constituency “paradox”.  Linguistic Inquiry 55: 659–695.
      • 2022 Larson R.K. Faces and vases. Invited talk presented at the First International Conference on Biolinguistics of the University of Quebec Three Rivers. (June 24-26, 2022).
      • 2020 Larson R.K. VP preposing and constituency “paradox”. Invited talk presented at the New York Institute. (July 20, 2020). 
Generalized Quantifier Syntax & Semantics

Generalized Quantifier theory posits that quantifiers possess argument structure like other predicates. This suggests that notions of predicate projection based on θ-roles might apply to them. Results with θ-features from my earlier work suggest a way of formalizing these ideas within the Minimalist Program, yielding many intriguing semantic questions. For example, θ-features in vP/VP have a direct interpretation within Neo-Davidsonian event semantics. If θ-features also apply in the projection of DP/DegP, can they too be given a Neo-Davidsonian, event semantics interpretation?

In this project, I am working out the consequences of these ideas. Fascinating puzzles & challenges arise!

Languages Studied in this Project:   English

Papers/Presentations/Chapters:

      • 2024 Larson R.K. Quantification, matching and events. Natural Language Semantics 32: 269-313.
      •  2022 Larson R.K. What adverbials & adverbial clauses may teach us about quantification. Cologne International Conference on Adverbial Clauses: Between Subordination and Coordination. (May 21, 2022).
      •  2016 Larson R.K. Quantificational states and argument separation. Workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of the Nominal Domain. Frankfurt University, (February 5 2016).
Diagnosing Definite D

What does it mean for a language to have a definite determiner (DD)? How do we diagnose its presence? The usual view (from Greenberg) is that having a DD = having a dedicated morpheme analogous to English “the”, or its equivalent in Spanish, French, German, Bulgarian, Macedonian, etc. However, it has been noted that languages that are “DD-less” in the Greenbergian sense may nonetheless make systematic use of de-stressed demonstratives (de-stressed 'that' or ’that’) in contexts where English would require use of a DD. In essence, when grammatical conditions require it, some DD-less languages appear able to “recruit” demonstratives as DDs. De-stressing appears to be crucial to recruitment. This observation raises a raft of interesting issues that I am following up in the project.  

 Languages Studied in this Project:  English, Mandarin, Serbian, Japanese, Slovenian

The Mathematical Theory of Merge

Recent research has suggested that syntactic objects and their operations might be formalized with concepts and methods drawn from abstract algebra (Hopf & Lie Algebras), and that this formalization might provide insight into what operations and structures are available to the human expression-building mechanism and why. These developments are in connection with the newly developed Mathematical Theory of Merge, and a volume by Marcolli, Chomsky and Berwick (MIT Pres 2025). I am very interested in these developments and their potential for shedding light on questions such as why morphological word-formation (derivation and compounding) is not semantically compositional whereas phrase-formaation (syntax) is. I will teach a seminar on Fall 2025 in which participants and I will work their way through the Marcolli, Chomsky and Berwick volume, along with some background material.