SAMKO SUCCESSFULLY DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Also last Wednesday (May 18), Bern Samko endured her final trial in the long journey towards the doctorate. Bern defended (successfully and in style) her dissertation — “Syntax and information structure: The grammar of English inversions” — before a large crowd of well-wishers and critics. The dissertation investigates some important theoretical questions about the driving forces of movement and, more broadly, about how syntactic processes and discourse-centered information structural processes interact with one another. The questions are addressed by way of a focus on some non-canonical word orders in English (participle preposing and VP preposing) and is notable both methodologically (it combines theoretical work with large-scale corpus work) and theoretically (informed equally by current strands in minimalist thinking about syntax and by the work in theoretical pragmatics that the SPLAP group has been reading and doing). Bern has been a leading member of SPLAP since its inception and her presence at its meetings will be sorely missed.