I would be very happy to supervise your MA-thesis if that fits in my area of expertise. If you intend to do your MA thesis on such a topic, I would be happy to meet and discuss. Below you find a number of pre-selected topics with some of my colleagues as co-supervisor. We’d be happy to work with you on those. Of course, you don’t have to select one of these topics. You can also choose a topic of your own, as long as it fits within my general research program / areas of expertise.
Topic 1: Null subjects (Zeijlstra)
Many languages allow pronominal subjects to be dropped. For instance, in Italian cant-o (sing.1SG) can means ‘I sing’ next to Io canto (I sing.1SG). Often, the ability of verbs to license so-called null (unpronounced) subjects is related to rich agreement. If you can determine on the shape of the verb what the subject is, you can drop it.
This rich agreement approach has faced several problems. For instance, not in every language with rich agreement can null subjects be licensed. And why can’t English -s not license 3rd person singular null subjects, since -s is a unique agreement form?
Recently, I proposed with Olaf Koeneman (Nijmegen) that what licenses null subjects is not only richness of agreement, but also a strict morphological separation between agreement and tense morphology. That works well for a number of languages, but for many others that still needs to be investigated. This can be done, for instance, for your mother tongue, in an MA thesis project.
Topic 2: Neg-Raising (Mirrazi, Zeijlstra)
In many languages, a sentence like I don’t think that she’ll be there actually means I think that she won’t be there. It looks as if the matrix negation takes scope from the embedded clause. Predicates like think andbelieve have this property and are therefore called Neg-Raising predicates.
Other predicates, like say or claim, are not Neg-Raising predicates, at least in English: I don’t claim she’ll be there does not mean I claim she won’t be there. But this distinction varies across languages. For instance, German hoffen is a Neg-Raiser, but English hope is not.
In recent work, Zahra Mirrazi and I have argued that what makes a predicate a Neg-Raiser depends on certain semantic properties. This seems to work well for most English predicates, but should be investigated for other predicates and other languages. This could be done for certain predicates in some language an MA thesis.
Topic 3: Futurates (Mendes, Zeijlstra)
In various languages, a present tense can be used to refer to the future, as in We meet tomorrow at 3pm. In English, this possibility is constrained to events that scheduled or settled by the laws of nature (The sun rises at 6am). In other languages, like Finnish, the use of so-called futurates is more liberal, but it is not clear if it is entirely unconstrained.
As an MA thesis project, you could conduct a typological survey on the pragmatic conditions that license futurates across a range of languages. The generalizations drawn from this survey could then be used to compare existing theories of futurates.
Topic 4: Predictive expressions (Mendes, Zeijlstra)
Some predictive expressions, like will, display a puzzling behavior: in some ways, they behave like modals, in others, they behave like tenses. Like modals, they’re subject to modal subordination – compare (1) and (2).
(1) Will you travel to France? You’ll have a great time!
= If you travel to France, you’ll have a great time.
(2) Did John travel to France? #He had a great time!
≠ If John traveled to France, he had a great time.
Like tenses, predictive expressions cannot yield different scope readings with respect to negation and other operators. That is, while (4) and (4b) have different scopal readings, that is not the case in (3).
(3) a. It’s not true that it will rain.
b. It will not rain.
(4) a. It’s not true that you must write a paper.
b. You must not write a paper.
In an MA project, you could investigate whether predictive expressions across languages behave like will in certain relevant respects, or whether there are languages in which predictive expressions behave like typical tenses or like typical modals.
Topic 5: Particle placement (Branan, Zeijlstra)
Many languages allow, or even require, a mismatch between what is morphologically marked as being focused and what is logically understood as being focused when portions of the clause itself are focused. For instance, in a broad focus clause in Ryukyuan, which might be uttered in response to a question like “What happened?” the focus marker would appear on the subject; in a clause where the VP is focused, which might be uttered in response to a question like “What did you do?” the focus marker would appear on the object. Previous work on this topic (jointly with Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) shows that these patterns are robustly attested cross-linguistically, and a theory of these patterns is developed.
We should expect these mismatches to appear in other domains of the clause. More specifically, we might expect similar effects to obtain within focused complex nominals ¡X the hope being that a focus particle might attach to a sub-constituent of a complex nominal while allowing the nominal as a whole to be focused. This project would involve finding and working with a speaker of such a language to determine whether or not such mismatches are allowed, and to develop a theory of why the facts are what they are. This would contribute more generally not only to our understanding of these sorts of focus mismatches, but also to our understanding of focus particle placement within complex nominals, a topic which remains little understood.
Topic 6: Growing down (Branan, Zeijlstra)
It is commonly assumed that syntactic trees are computed from the “bottom up” constituents lower in the tree were subject to a combinatoric operation, Merge, earlier than constituents higher in the tree. A small body of work (Philips, Richards, Kotek & Franks) has argued for a different approach, where trees are computed from the “top down”, on this view constituents higher in the syntactic tree were subject to Merge before constituents lower in the tree. One advantage of this latter approach is that it corresponds in a more straightforward manner to what we would like to assume about syntactic parsing. This project would involve identifying what a good argument for (or against) the “top down” view would look like, and showing that there are linguistic phenomena which seem to instantiate this argument. This would contribute to an ongoing debate about what is the right way to think of the syntax, and how it should relate to other aspects of the language faculty, such as parsing.
Topic 7: Argument severance (Branan, Zeijlstra)
Considerable work has shown that objects and subjects differ in their syntactic properties, and theories of these differences often appeal to a structural distinction between the two: subjects are introduced in a specifier position, while objects are introduced in a complement position. A separate line of work suggests that direct objects are on a par with subjects, in that they too are introduced in a specifier position. This point of contention is the focus of the thesis: one could develop a novel argument that direct objects are indeed specifiers, and then propose a novel approach to the subject/object distinction. Or one could defuse arguments for the object-as-specifier approach, with the goal being a return to the classical approach to the distinction between subjects and objects which relies on the non-complement/ complement divide. This would contribute to our understanding of the decomposition of classical grammatical notions like “subject”, and what constraints we should posit on syntactic operations.
Topic 8: Testing individuability through quantity judgment tasks (Lin, Zeijlstra, Lin)
It has been long discussed how languages like Mandarin, which use classifiers and lack count syntax, encode the distinction between objects and substances. Previous experimental work has used the quantity judgment paradigm (Barner & Snedeker 2005, 2006) to test the individuability of bare nouns (Lin & Schaeffer 2018) and of classifiers (Zhu & Syrett 2022). For example, participants are shown two piles of stones—one larger in number and the other larger in overall volume—and asked the prompt in (1). Choosing 4 (higher in volume) yields a substance response, while choosing 6 (larger in number) yields an object response.
(1) [Context: John has 4 big pieces of stone and Mary has 6 small pieces of stone.]
Shei de shitou geng duo?
who POSS stone COMP more
“Who has more (stones)?”
In your MA project, you could carry out an experimental study of the individuation properties of nominal expressions in a language of your interest (with Ziling Zhu). Alternatively, you could investigate how Mandarin L2 speakers—whose L1 (e.g. German/English) does not have classifiers—interpret bare nouns and classifiers in Mandarin (with Jing Lin, VU Amsterdam).
Topic 9: Question-embeddings of factives (Zeijlstra, Zhu)
In English, cognitive factives allow both wh-questions and whether-questions in their complements:
(1) a. John knows who came to the party.
b. John knows whether Andy came to the party.
However, emotive factives allow wh-questions but not whether-questions:
(2) a. John is surprised at who came to the party.
b. *John is surprised at whether Andy came to the party.
In your MA project, you can examine whether this asymmetry between wh- and whether-questions holds across languages, which would indicate a general semantic restriction on emotive factives, or whether it is specific to English factives.
Topic 9: Intentionality (Goncharov, Zeijlstra)
When we say Alice baked a cake or Alice lost her keys, we convey not only what happened but also whether the action was intentional or accidental. It is tempting to attribute these interpretations to the lexical meanings of the verbs bake and lose, as many current analyses in fact do. But this simple explanation misses a key observation about the distinction: namely, that it interacts with a range of linguistic constructions, sometimes rendering them ungrammatical. These constructions include:
-
co-reference in attitude reports in many Indo-European languages, e.g., *Je veux que je parte ‘I want that I leave’ in French;
-
the licensing of polarity sensitive items, such as a damn thing in English or uno cualquira ‘any/a random’ in Spanish;
-
switch-reference marking in languages like Newari, Lakhota, and Kiowa;
-
aspect and mood selection in Slavic and Romance languages;
-
extraction from adjuncts in English;
-
and more.
In an MA thesis, you could (i) look closely at one of the intention-sensitive constructions above and improve on its analysis or empirical description; (ii) investigate cross-linguistic variation in one of the constructions above; (iii) try to unify the existing analyses of two or more intention-sensitive constructions; or (iv) discover and describe a new intention-sensitive construction that has not been reported so far.