Jason Merchant
Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Linguistics
Classics 305
1010 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: (773) 702- 8523
http://home.uchicago.edu/~merchant
merchant@uchicago.edu
My primary research area is syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. Much of my work has concentrated on elliptical phenomena (sluicing, VP-ellipsis, fragment answers, pseudogapping, nonsententials, and in comparatives), exploring especially the connections to theories of A'-movement and islands on the syntactic side and to questions of how varieties of meaning are represented on the semantic and philosophical side. I'm also interested in questions of syntactic typology, resumptive pronouns, case, voice, and psycholinguistics. My primary languages of investigation are the Germanic languages and Greek, with excursions into Slavic and Romance (including fieldwork on Vlach).
Education
- PhD, UC-Santa Cruz, 1999; at Chicago since January 2001
Recent Publications
- An asymmetry in voice mismatches in VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping. 2008. Linguistic Inquiry 39.1: 169-179.
- Variable island repair under ellipsis. 2008. In Kyle Johnson (ed.), Topics in ellipsis, 132-153. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
- Fragments and ellipsis. 2004. Linguistics and Philosophy 27.6:661-738.
- The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. 2001. Oxford University Press: Oxford.