ALUMNA REPORT: LINE MIKKELSEN

Line Mikkelsen (Ph.D. 2004, now Assistant Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley) writes:

Teaching at UC Berkeley has allowed me to continue my work with Jorge on the morpho-syntax of Scandinavian nominals (we are currently working on CP complements to D) and, more generally, to stay in touch with people and projects at Santa Cruz. My recent work on the prosody, information-structure, and position of Danish object pronouns has direct connections to ongoing work by Judith Fiedler on German pronouns and it’s been great to be able to exchange views in person. Having, finally, extracted myself from the world of copular clauses (the topic of my dissertation), I am devoting most of my research efforts to Danish verb phrase anaphora and what it can tell us about the Danish auxiliary system (joint work with Michael Houser and Maziar Toosarvandani at Berkeley) and verb-second syntax (read more here). I’ve recently joined forces with Dan Hardt and Bjarne Øersnes of the Copenhagen Business School and we’ll be meeting in Berkeley this May together with more local VP anaphora experts (Michael Houser, Andy Kehler, and Ivan Sag) to bring together the various strands of research on VP anaphora and articulate where we want to take this research in the next decade. This winter I have also begun a very different project with Berkeley colleagues Alice Gaby (who spoke about Kuuk Thaayorre desideratives at CUSP in Santa Cruz) and Andrew Garrett. We are working with the Karok tribe and people who live along the Klamath River between Yreka and Orleans on the Karok language. The tribe has an active language revitalization program and the idea is to identify topics that need better teaching materials and are of linguistic interest and work on these. This kind of work is entirely new to me, and somewhat intimidating. At our very first visit in February, a discussion arose between two Karok speakers (a younger second-language learner and an older native speaker) as to whether the name of a particular tribal committee should include the prefix pa- or not. According to Bill Bright’s grammar, pa- is, among other things, a definiteness marker. It is extremely common in texts, but its distribution is somewhat mysterious, especially in the context of possessives and generics. So I found my first topic. Spring greetings to all!