Luís López-Carretero (Ph.D., Cornell University)
Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics
(312) 996-3243
luislope@uic.edu

Click here for CV.

Areas of interest: Syntactic theory and Romance syntax. Interfaces of syntax with semantics, information structure and phonology. Language ideologies in contemporary Spain.

My main interest is the study of the syntactic structure of natural language and how a structure is mapped onto interpretive mechanisms. I take natural language syntax to be a particular expression of a mental capacity apparent in other cognitive areas (i.e.: arithmetic) that allows humans to combine symbols into sets of symbols recursively. My approach is mostly comparative/contrastive and is couched within a theoretical framework loosely labeled "transformational-generative". Since 1993 this framework has taken a sharp turn with the arrival of the Minimalist Program and the constraint-based Optimality Theory. I am interested in both because I believe both have allowed us to see things that we could not see before and as a consequence our current syntactic exploration is deeper than it used to be fifteen years ago.

If you click where it says CV you will find information about my publications, presentations, fellowships and unpublished manuscripts. Please do not hesitate to request any materials you may want. In the next couple of paragraphs I summarize what my current projects are about.

The manuscript "A-dependencies" builds on the work of Frampton and Guttman (1999, 2002) and Chomsky (2000, 2001) and attempts to construct a crash-proof approach to syntax by eliminating all long distance dependencies and replace them with short distance complex dependencies. In the process, a number of technical assumptions of the minimalist program are revisited and shown to be unnecessary or misguided ( -completeness, Minimal Link Condition, Merge-over-Move, among others.) I focus on case/agreement relations and tackle some particularly difficult empirical problems: [person] restrictions in Icelandic quirky subject constructions and their absence in Spanish, indefinite SE in Spanish, expletive constructions in several languages.

A second line of research involves the syntactic expression of such information structural notions as theme, rheme and contrast. In the Romance languages we find a bewildering array of constructions that affect the information packaging of sentences: dislocations (left and right) focus fronting, p-movement, emarginazione, clitic doubling, hanging topics. To make things more complicated some of these constructions are present in all of Romance while others appear only in one or two languages. Building on my 2003 article on Catalan dislocations I am attempting to construct a broad framework in which a derivational CHL interfaces with the interpretive modules at certain given points (phases, or something similar).

Finally, I am also interested in the language ideologies of contemporary Spain, as can be gleaned from the press and other outlets, how these ideologies connect with specific nationalist politics (central and peripheral) and how professional linguists contribute to articulate and disseminate these ideologies. In a forthcoming article I show how these ideologies affect the practice of professors of linguistics giving rise to obvious inconsistencies in their analyses.

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