Erik Zyman
Areas of Study: Department of Linguistics Teaching Since 2018 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ezyman Contact: Email Interests:
Syntax, Syntax-Morphology Interface, Syntax-Semantics Interface
Dr. Erik Zyman’s research is in theoretical syntax, and it’s driven by the following questions: (1) What principles, elementary operations, and atomic elements determine how lexical items can and can’t be combined to form larger syntactic structures? (2) Which of those are universal, which vary crosslinguistically, and why? (3) What are their cognitive (and other) underpinnings? Erik is interested in many syntactic processes and phenomena: (External and Internal) Merge, constituency, selection, projection, adjunction, the argument/adjunct distinction, phases and (anti)locality, “wordhood” and (anti)mirror effects, and more. In short, he seeks to characterize the elementary operations that build syntactic structures and to determine why they have the properties they do. His research languages have included English, Latin, and P’urhepecha, among others.