Erik Zyman’s research in the news

Erik Zyman (PhD, 2018), currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, was recently featured in Tableau, the University of Chicago’s humanities magazine. He described his research in syntax:

As a theoretical syntactician, he is interested in “identifying the fundamental operations that build syntactic structure in human language.” One basic operation, which linguists call Merge, combines two words or phrases into a larger unit. Although Merge is fundamental to many versions of generative syntax—an approach according to which grammar is governed by deep laws—Zyman says the operation is difficult to define with precision while both satisfying the relevant conceptual requirements (elegance, simplicity, and others) and accounting for the properties that the relevant syntactic structures have in human language. In a forthcoming article in the journal Syntax, Zyman says he “develops a novel formal definition of Merge that overcomes some drawbacks of previous ones while building on their strengths.”

Zyman aligns himself with a tradition of seeking order beneath complexity: “The second-century Alexandrian syntactician Apollonius Dyscolus was convinced that syntax is fundamentally orderly and rationally comprehensible. Nearly two millennia later, Noam Chomsky, building on a view of Galileo’s, stated that ‘Nature is in fact simple and it’s the task of the scientists to show how that’s the case.’ I agree with both of them.”