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 would like to set up 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. Furthermore, the group has a traditional interest in the semantics of time and aspect. Projects we have in mind will be about temporal reasoning and aspectual adverbs, connecting their polarity behavior to conditionals and counterfactuals in dynamic semantics.