Line Mikkelsen
Assistant Professor

syntax, semantics, morphology, Danish, philosophy of language

Group: Syntax & Semantics

Contact information

Email: mikkelsen@berkeley.edu

Office hours: Monday 2-3, and by appointment

Web site: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~mikkelsen

Personal statement

Ph.D., Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2004. Her research interests are the syntax, semantics, and morphology of natural language, and the relations among these. Most of her work has centered on Danish and English. She has worked on noun incorporation, definiteness marking, expletive constructions, relative clauses, and copular constructions (the last is the topic of her dissertation). Most recently she has become interested in verb phrase anaphora, coordination of pronouns, and various kinds of complex DP structures, the latter as part of ongoing joint work with Jorge Hankamer (UCSC) on the morphosyntax of definiteness marking in the Scandinavian languages. She has a long-standing interest in philosophy of language and is affiliated with the department of philosophy .

Selected publications

"On prosody and focus in object shift" To appear in Syntax. [pdf]

"Copular clauses" To appear in Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, and Paul Portner (eds.) Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [pdf]

"Specification under Discussion." To appear in Proceedings of BLS 34. [pdf]

"Definiteness marking and the structure of Danish pseudopartitives." (Jorge Hankamer). Journal of Linguistics 44:2, 317--346 (2008). [pdf]

 "On so-called truncated clefts"  In Ljudmila Geist and Björn Rothstein (eds.) Kopulaverben und Kopulasätze: Intersprachliche und Intrasprachliche Aspekte, pp. 47--68. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag (2007) [pdf]

Verb Phrase Pronominalization in Danish: Deep or Surface Anaphora. (With Michael Houser and Maziar Toosarvandani). In Erin Brainbridge and Brian Agbayani (eds.) Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Western Conference on Linguistics, 183-195 (2007)

Copular Clauses: Specification, predication and equation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (2005). [link]

"When movement must be blocked: A reply to Embick and Noyer." With Jorge Hankamer. Linguistic Inquiry 36(1), 85-125 (2005).

"Specificational subjects -- a formal characterization and some consequences." Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 36, 79-112 (2004).

"A morphological analysis of definite nouns in Danish." With Jorge Hankamer. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 14:2, 137-175 (2002)

"Reanalyzing the definiteness effect: Evidence from Danish." Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 69, 1-75 (2002)

"Expletive subjects in subject relative clauses." In Werner Abraham and Jan-Wouter Zwart (eds.) Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax, 71-93, Amsterdam: John Benjamins (2002).

"Specification is not inverted predication." In Masako Hirotani (ed.) Proceedings of NELS 32, 403-422 (2002).