Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Cruz
Office:
240 Stevenson College
Address:
1156 High St.
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Email:
matucker{at}ucsc{dot}edu
Hello, my name is Matthew Tucker, and I am a fifth-year graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz with interests in formal syntax, morphology, and syntactic interfaces. Below are highlights and announcements of what I'm currently up to. For more information, click on any of the links above.
Posted 5 October 2011
This year I'm preparing my dissertation, Variable Agreement: The Morphosyntax of Syntactic Binding under the direction of Jim McCloskey. The dissertation deals with a class of syntactic phenomena (the anaphor agreement effect, wh-agreement, and the anti-agreement effect) which crosslinguistically appear time and again with impoverished verbal morphology. I argue that this morphological pattern is not an accident, and instead the result of a syntax which is (largely) similar across the three constructions. I identify a syntactic operation which is common to all three (operator-variable binding) and argue that this relationship has a privileged realization in an autonomous morphological component, namely, impoverished agreement. This is supported with data from Italian, Berber, and Acehnese, among several others.
Posted 5 October 2011
The past year I've had the distinct pleasure of getting to edit (with Nicholas LaCara and Anie Thompson) a festschrift for one of my committee members, Jorge Hankamer. The volume was recently released on the University of California eScholarship digital repository and can be accessed in its entirety online here. In addition to editing the volume, I also have a paper in the collection, on which comments are definitely welcome.
Posted 6 June 2010
This fall I will be a Visiting Student at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics, working on my dissertation and related projects with David Embick and others. If you're going to be in the Philadelphia area, please drop me a line so we can talk shop.
Posted 10 June 2009
I am currently participating in a research group here at UCSC called Cross-Linguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology. This team is hoping to use typological work to shed some light on the interactions between seriality and cyclicity in morphosyntax and morphophonology. Please see the CrISP website for output, etc. Comments on our progress are most definitely welcome!