Description du sujet de thèse

Thesis subject : "Beyond formal registers. Reduced and elliptical structures in written language and colloquial varieties". This Ph.D. candidate will conduct crosslinguistic research on reduced forms, attested and unattested in formal written registers, at the light of generative approaches, under the co-direction of Carlo Cecchetto (CNRS) and Jason Merchant (UChicago). A classical controversy regarding reduced sentences is whether they are generated as small structures, or whether initially they are full sentences that have undergone a process akin to ellipsis. The Ph.D. candidate will reconsider this general debate at the light of findings from structures like reduced participial clauses, VP ellipsis, Right Node Raising, sluicing and special registers like headlines.

Contexte de travail

The doctoral contract is the result of a collaboration between the SFL laboratory (a joint research unit of the CNRS and Paris 8 University) and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago U.S.A. The doctoral student will spend one term in Chicago and the rest of the time in Paris during each of the three years of the program. Their work will be framed in the context of the Syntax/Semantics team of the SFL laboratory. The doctoral student will participate in the research activities and seminars of this team and contribute to the organization of scientific events such as the RALFe conference, the Chicago Linguistics Society colloquium, and other events related to the study of ellipsis and of reduced structure.