This page reports my current thinking on the topics that I work on. For the list of published works, please consult the papers and talks pages.
I am interested in morphosyntactic conditions of allomorphy
Locality of allomorphy. I believe that the trigger and the target of allomorphy must be the structurally adjacent (sisters in the syntactic structure). My current thinking is that the counterexamples should be accounted for by positing that morpheme orders can present structural ambiguity: independent evidence for such ambiguity is a topic of my current research.
Cumulative exponence. I believe that morphosyntactic heads can correspond to a single exponent iff they form a ‘‘chain’’ of being pairwise structurally adjacent. This differs both from theories that limit cumulative exponence to linear or head-complement sequences. I am currently looking into cumulative exponence of pronominal arguments with tense-aspect-mood features as evidence in favor of my view.
I am interested in phonological conditions of allomorphy:
Utility of underlying representations. I believe that abstract underlying representations provide a better model for complex morpho-phonological phenomena than alternatives like transderivational comparison of outputs or direct reference to syntactic structure by phonological rules. My research goal is not only to provide abstract UR analyses but to also explore their learnability and compatibility with experimental results on productivity.
Phonological conditioning of suppletion. I believe that we currently lack a satisfactory theory of cases when a suppletive alternation refers to prosodic structure: phonological optimization approaches undergenerate, while subcategorization frame approaches are theoretically unsatisfactory due to their lack of predictive power and a problematic conception of contexts of insertion rules vis-a-vis natural classes.
I am interested in linearization of syntactic structure
Interactions with ellipsis. Constraints on syntactic movement have been argued to follow if linearization applies cyclically, with incoherent linearization statements resulting in ungrammaticality. If so, ellipsis is predicted to repair violations of such restrictions. Together with Ivan Kalyakin, I look into Russian left branch extraction which presents a case of repair by ellipsis but necessitates a more intricate theory of ellipsis-linearization interaction because repair by ellipsis is not freely available.
Head movement and affix hopping. I’m interested in viability of a multidominance-based theory of head movement can be extended to cases of so-called affix hopping (also known as Lowering) if formation of complex words is sometimes driven by selectional requirements of the root-categorizer combination. This topic is related to ellipsis concerns: if it is correct that some languages (like Russian) lack verb-stranding VP ellipsis while other languages don’t, a theory of interaction between ellipsis and head movement must predict this variation. The hope is that a multidominance-based theory of head displacement will capture the variation.
More broadly, I am interested in all topics related to morphosyntax of Russian:
Argument structure. Together with Ivan Kalyakin and Maria Berkovich, I look into the status of external arguments across various syntactic configurations: for example, I believe we have good evidence that putative counterexamples to unaccusativity diagnostics involve unaccusative construals of unergative verbs and that the OVS word order in Russian does not involve a ``true’’ external argument.
Structure of nominalizations. I currently work on restrictions on deverbal nominalizations in Russian. It seems like restructuring verbs either cannot be nominalized or cease to be able to take a small embedded clause as nominalizations. The `why?’ question is yet to be answered (although I have hypotheses).
Scrambling. In an ongoing project with Stepa Mikhailov and Viktoria Zhukova, I investigate reconstruction properties of Russian long-distance scrambling and other restrictions on it. I believe these properties might shed light on a well-known problem of it being unable to feed short wh-movement.
Finally, I work on some topics concerning the semantics-pragmatics interface
Polarity items. I am working on an analysis of Russian positive polarity disjunction ili that takes into account its sensitivity to discourse structure. When disjunction is topicalized, it becomes capable of taking narrow scope relative to clausemate negation, in apparent contradiciton of its PPI status.
Meta-questions. Together with Petr Rossyaykin, I am working on an approach to restrictions on Russian meta-questions (we believe that they cannot target use-conditional content) and the possibility of meta-meta-questions in Russian.