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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
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
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
·
Tense marking and inflectional
morphology in Indo-Portuguese creoles
·
The effect of language contact
on conjugation classes
·
Morphomic structure and
loan-verb integration
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.
Romance
Contact Varieties: Barranquenho
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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