Ph.D. Fellowships in Linguistics

Syntax and semantics group

The research of the group is about the syntactic and semantic aspects of the human language faculty and the way it is embedded in our general cognitive capacities.

We would like to attract PhD candidates on projects either in syntax or semantics. Syntactic projects we have in mind have to fit into the theoretical interests of the group, which concern the issue of the relative desirability of dynamic, strictly derivational grammars versus the more cartographic models of grammar. Against this general background, we are particularly interested in research about pied piping, verb movements, and case and agreement phenomena. Increasingly, the group also studies these phenomena from a typological point of view.

As for projects in semantics, the group is interested in, on the one hand, projects in corpus-based research on growth and change of the lexicon. Topics of special attention are negative polarity items and lexical domains with rapid growth and specialization, such as in the case of degree adverbs and minimalizing expressions. On the other hand, there is active research on optimization approaches to interpretation. The group also conducts experimental studies on first language acquisition of tense and aspect, quantification, anaphora, and embedding, with an eye on the relation between language and human cognition. Project proposals within either of these broad areas would be welcome.

For further information, contact Jan-Wouter Zwart (c dot j dot w dot zwart at rug dot nl).