michal.starke@nyu.edu

Teaching: a class on language acquisition, in which we will get our hands dirty and try to use a prototype of a new software to analyse kid speech and squeeze new juice out of it. We will also be looking at the plausibility of fine-grained lexicon-driven acquisition of syntax. In parallel, I am co-teaching with Greg Guy a general introduction to language, leaving the nitty gritty aside and concentrating on the exciting big picture.

Researching: My research generally focuses on the overall architecture of grammar, with particular emphasis on syntactic theory. It includes work showing that the underlying structure of clauses, prepositions, pronouns and small clauses are all similar; work on reducing all locality to a single and well-known principle, Relativised Minimality; work showing that the notion of "specifier" is an anachronism that we would do well to forget about, etc. In parallel, I have done work on the acquisition of binding, and am currently developing software to help researchers working with child language corpora.

Organising: I am one of the main organisers of the free and jumpy EGG summerschool, where many linguists have found their vocation (yes, often between two tequilas). Recently, I have created TiLT (with Eric Reuland): a series of conferences for those of us committed to depth, elegance and explanatory power of the theories we are using.