Line Mikkelsen

DP structure and definiteness marking

Together with Jorge Hankamer at UCSC, I've been investigating the morphosyntax of definiteness marking in Scandinavian languages, primarily Danish, and its interactions with the internal structure of DPs in these languages, including attributive adjectives, relative clauses, and PP modifiers. Most recently, we have investigated the structure of pseudopartitives and how it interacts with definiteness marking (Definiteness marking and the structure of Danish pseudopartitives), and we are currently working on definiteness marking in DPs containing clausal complements to N.

Pronominal coordination

As part of a larger investigation of the structure, meaning and use of near-synonymous expressions, this project examines coordination of pronouns (like you and me) in contrast with plural pronouns (us). Undergraduate students Jed Pizarro-Guevara and Milla Nizar have worked with me on the project since Fall of 2008. Our goal is to determine the factors that govern the use of coordinated vs plural pronominals and relate these to properties of pronouns and coordination more generally. A large-scale corpus study demonstrates that pronominal coordination occurs disproportionately with expressions of exclusivity and distributivity, and also occurs disproportionately in environments reserved for plural noun phrases as well as in non-canonical syntactic positions, such as left-dislocated and right-dislocated positions. These results were presented at the Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle\ in May 2009 [handout]. The next phase of the project involves an experimental investigation aimed at testing the semantic and pragmatic factors that cause this distribution.

VP anaphora and VP topicalization

I am interested in VP topicalization and VP anaphora constructions, especially ones that involve an overt proform. The latter are found in several Germanic languages (including Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, and Swedish), but there is relatively little work on these, compared with the very large literature on VP ellipsis. In joint work with Michael Houser, Maziar Toosarvandani, and early on also Ange Strom-Weber, I am investigating VP topicalization and VP anaphora constructions in Danish, including their interactions with verb second, tense marking, and A-bar extraction. Various aspects of this work have been presented in various venues (talks), and we have written two papers on the topic: one on the distribution of auxiliaries in VP topicalization and VP anaphora [Defective auxiliaries in Danish and English] and one on the VP anaphora construction that employs an overt proform [Verb Phrase Pronominalization in Danish: Deep or Surface Anaphora?] We are also in the process of building an annotated and searchable database of attested examples. The database is accessible from a separate project website.