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description=photo credit: Calvin Cheung I am Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. I am primarily interested in the human capacity for syntax, the cognitive system that underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages. The core questions are: what creates the patterns? how do they relate to meaning on the…;

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david adger syntax and other stuff home brief bio blog research projects publications videos talks podcasts popular science david adger syntax and other stuff search search twitter facebook home photo credit calvin cheung i am professor of linguistics at queen mary university of london i am primarily interested in the human capacity for syntax the cognitive system that underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages the core questions are what creates the patterns how do they relate to meaning on the one hand and sound on the other what governs the range of variation in the patterns answering these questions allows us to tackle the issue of what the nature of the syntactic system is my work involves developing generative theories of syntactic patterns and investigating the consequences of these theories both for particular languages and across genetically unrelated languages i ve worked on scottish gaelic and other celtic languages but have used data from many other languages to test theoretical proposals about the syntax of human language my book language unlimited tries to explain the kind of linguistics i do in a popular science type format my forthcoming book mereological syntax mit press november 2025 develops a new theory of the kind of structure that underlies grammar i m fundamentally interested in how syntactic patterns relate to meanings at its simplest why does lilly bit anson mean something different from anson bit lilly obviously order of words matters but how is the connection between order structure and meaning negotiated my other main interest is how theories of syntax can be used to handle the variable use of different syntactic patterns by a single individual and whether these theories have anything to contribute to explaining probabilistic patterns we see in the use of different syntactic forms for my attempt to explain my work using just the most common 1000 words of english see here i m also on bluesky share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook latest posts mereological syntax so i finished a new book a week or so back and since i m not really using the hideous mess that twitter has become i getting creative the benefits of a backstory originally posted on creating languages by maya kigariff based on a project for the qmul linguistics constructing a language course fejasi speakers when creating a are generative grammarians abandoning innateness a recent blog post by martin haspelmath has the very buzzfeed title some ex generative grammarians who are abandoning innateness the actual post then goes on that lsa letter i ve had a couple of senior colleagues ask me why i signed the lsa letter one curious one censorious i ve also had a number of follow me on twitter my tweets blog at wordpress com subscribe subscribed david adger join 25 other subscribers sign me up already have a wordpress com account log in now privacy david adger subscribe subscribed sign up log in copy shortlink report this content view post in reader manage subscriptions collapse this bar loading comments write a comment email required name required website