About
My primary research area is linguistic theory of the syntactic variety. That is, descriptions and explanations of syntactic structures in natural languages, coupled with attempts to derive from these an understanding of the universal properties of human language. I regularly teach graduate courses on syntactic theory, semantics, and the history of linguistic theory and methodology. I also teach basic courses in Linguistics at the undergraduate level.
Projects
Spenser Syntax Project Prospectus - Stanley Dubinsky & David Lee Miller
An analysis of the syntax of the major narrative poem in sixteenth
century England, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
- The project will contribute a layer of syntactic analysis to the electronically accessible and tagged edition of The Faerie Queene that is currently under preparation for The Spenser Archive: http://spenser.cas.sc.edu/web_pages/about.html.
- The project will contribute to the resolution of outstanding questions of interpretation of passages in Spenser's work.
- The project will aid in editorial decision-making by helping to adjudicate among competing versions of the text.
- The project will make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the syntax of Early Modern English and to our knowledge of the history of the English language.
- The project will serve as a future model for the grammatical analysis and syntactic tagging of other literary sources.
- The project will train (and serve as a model for training) literary scholars in the application of linguistic principles to textual analysis.
Categories Of Subordination and Properties of Finiteness:
Explorations in Linguistic Typology and Aalysis
William D. Davies (University of Iowa)
Stanley Dubinsky (University of South Carolina)
Languages display wide variation in how they express sentential
(propositional) concepts, especially when those concepts are embedded in
a larger clause. Propositional (subordinated) objects of verbs, in
English alone, can be tensed clauses (1), infinitival clauses (2),
gerundive phrases (3), participial clauses (4), or noun phrases (5).
(1) I hope that they will win.
(2) He wanted him to beat them.
(3) I see him winning the race.
(4) I saw them beaten on their home court.
(5) I watched their defeat of the other team.
Other languages have even more variation in the grammar of
subordination. The purpose of the investigation at hand, then, will be
to:
- Survey the range of ways (i.e. clausal types) in which propositional concepts can be expressed intra- and cross-linguistically, looking at subordination (complements, modifiers, relative clauses, appositives, etc.) and at other "defective" clause types (imperatives, exclamatives, etc.)
- Examine the morphosyntax and semantics of properties traditionally associated with the broad notion "finiteness" (e.g. tense, aspect, subject-verb agreement, etc.)
- Assess the relative adequacy of various theoretical approaches to the representation of finiteness and the structure of subordinate clauses.
