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Research Interests
Inflectional Morphology and Clitics
·
Portuguese
Inflection and Pronominal Clitics
·
Portuguese Verbal
inflection within Paradigm Function Morphology
·
Phrasal affixation
and mixed clitic systems
·
The prosodic
phonology of clitics
·
Romance clitic
systems
·
Udi subject
agreement markers
·
English
Auxiliaries
My MA dissertation and my PhD thesis, both
supervised by Professor Andrew Spencer at the University of Essex,
focus on the relation between morphology, syntax and phonology. My
MA dissertation discusses criteria for determining the affixal status of
English reduced auxiliaries. In my PhD thesis, I’ve examined the
inflectional behaviour of pronominal clitics in European Portuguese and
developed an inflectional account of cliticisation.
As part of my wider interest in morphological and
morphosyntactic typology, I have extended my findings to Romanian/Romance
(Luís in prep), Udi/Caucasian (Luís&Spencer 2004b), Capadoccia/Asia
Minor Greek (Luís 2003), Fula and Swahili/Bantu (Luís 2004), among other.
Theoretically, I’ve worked within the theory of
Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump 2001) and collaborated with Andrew
Spencer in the development of a revised version of this theory using data
on cliticisation and verbal inflection (Luís 2004a, Luís&Spencer
2004a). In Spencer (ms), the revised theory is applied to various other
morphological phenomena.
Morphosyntax
and the morphology-syntax interface
·
Proclitic contexts and their effect on clitic placement
·
The correspondence
between morphological tokens and syntactic atoms
·
Phrasal affixes
within LFG
·
The
grammaticalization of pronominal clitics within LFG
I have also examined the interaction between
morphology and syntax. In this domain, I have worked in particular on
inflectional phenomena that appear to be motivated significantly by
syntactic properties. My work on the morphology-syntax interface has been
developed within the architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar with Louisa Sadler (University
of Essex) and Ryo Otoguro (Waseda
University, Japan).
Creole Morphology
One of my recent research interests is creole
morphology. I started by examining the fate of Portuguese inflectional affixes
with John Holm (University
of Coimbra). I now
intend to examine creole morphology against the background of a general
typology of morphological constructions and phenomena to determine the
exact range of structures and compare them with the patterns found in the
substrate and superstrate languages. I’m also interested in investigating
the effect of language contact on verbal inflection and in finding out how
different theories of morphology express their views on morphological
patterns.
The claim that pidgins and creoles do have
inflection and non-transparent morphology has important implications for
defining the characteristics of these two kinds of contact languages. It is
clear now that our understanding of some of the basic characteristics of pidgin
and creole languages needs to be revised. These findings also have
significant repercussions on any modern linguistic theory for two
reasons: a) they show that creoles, like any other natural language, can be
used to test the validity of morphological theories, and b)
they stimulate the search for a coherent formal account of how
morphological structure can change due to language contact.
Research areas:
·
Tense marking and
inflectional morphology in Indo-Portuguese creoles
·
The effect of
language contact on conjugation classes
·
Morphomic
structure and loan-verb integration
Romance Contact Varieties
Barranquenho is an Iberian contact language
currently spoken at the Spanish/Portuguese border, in the SE of Portugal.
The people from Barrancos (ca. 2000 inhabitants) have created a separate
cultural identity and maintain three linguistic varieties: Barranquenho,
their local variety, Spanish, the variety that historically they have ties
with, and Portuguese, the language of the nation in which they live. Under the coordination of Clancy Clements (Indiana University), I have also been
involved in the description of the grammatical features of Barranquenho, on
the basis of a recently collected spoken corpus.
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