Roots in context: a cross linguistic investigation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Artemis Alexiadou
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561341760

This project will deal with foundational issues concerning the relationship between the lexicon and morphosyntax from a crosslinguistic perspective. We focus on questions concerning the distribution of roots, used as a technical morphological term, in morpho-syntactic context: how to constrain this distribution and how to account for modulations in meaning which accompany variation in the distribution. The project brings together the expertise of Alexiadou, who is one of the leading developers of ideas in the framework of Distributed Morphology and its application to different languages, and Rappaport Hovav, a leading scholar on fleshing out the grammatically relevant components of meaning encoded in roots and other units in sustained in-depth studies of argument alternations. This collaboration will capitalize on strengths of the two PIs, thus promising to lead to well-established new empirical findings, sophisticated theoretical explanations of these findings and fine-tuning of current theories of the lexicon-syntax interface. Instead of taking a broad, typological, perspective, we propose to carry out in-depth studies of three languages – Hebrew, English and Greek, which differ in ways which appear to be crucial for an account of the phenomena we propose to study. For the kinds of generalizations we are interested in, only such sustained in-depth studies are relevant, but they should lay the foundations for larger cross-linguistic studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Partner Organisation: The Israel Science Foundation
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Malka Rappaport Hovav