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Verbal Contract

Posted on 5 April 2018

Peter Sells awarded Leverhulme Trust grant for study of verb and verb phrase topicalisation

Peter Sells has been awarded a study grant from the Leverhulme Trust for the academic year 2018-19, to commence a project called 'Verb and Verb Phrase Topicalisation in Languages of Eurasia' in October of this year. Peter will research two related construction types in which the verb of the sentence appears twice, to provide emphasis or for a clarificatory function. Only some languages of Europe and Asia have these constructions, and the project will involve collecting and analysing data from Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Polish and Russian, as well as related data from Norwegian and Swedish. The goals of the project are to develop a formal syntactic account of the two construction types, more detailed than in previous research, to show how – or if – they are related, and to draw some wider consequences for syntactic theory.

Congratulations, Peter!

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