DENNIS OTT

Postdoctoral researcher
Ph.D. 2011, Harvard University 		Department of Linguistics
P.O. Box 716
NL-9700 AS Groningen
The Netherlands

+31-(0)50-363-9619
dennis.ott@post.harvard.edu

My research focuses chiefly on what has been dubbed the displacement property of natural-language systems, i.e. the fact that elements are pronounced in positions different from the positions in which they are interpreted. In technical parlance, I'm a syntactician mainly working on movement, locality, and ellipsis, and the variation across languages with respect to these phenomena. Currently I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project Incomplete Parenthesis (PI: Mark de Vries).

I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in May 2011; a slightly revised version of my dissertation will appear in de Gruyter's Linguistische Arbeiten series. In my spare time, I'm an amateur nature photographer: see my portfolio and photo stream.

>> Check out the free & fun EGG School in Wroclaw, Poland (July 23-August 5, 2012)! <<

Selected publications and manuscripts

submitted. An ellipsis approach to Contrastive Left-dislocation. Ms., University of Groningen.

submitted. Symmetric Merge and local instability: Evidence from split topics. Ms., University of Groningen.

2012. Thinking in the right direction. To appear in Linguistics in the Netherlands. [with Mark de Vries]

2012. Peripheral fragments: Dislocation as ellipsis. LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts (published by eLanguage).

2011. Local instability: The syntax of split topics. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University. [citation/abstract]

2011. A note on free relative clauses in the theory of phases. Linguistic Inquiry 42(1):183-192. [preprint]

2011. Diminutive-formation in German: Spelling out the classifier analysis. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 14(1):1-46. [preprint]

2010. The syntax and semantics of genus-species splits in German. To appear in Proceedings of CLS 46. [with Andreea Nicolae]

2009. Stylistic fronting as remnant movement. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 83:141-178.

Recent and upcoming presentations

2012. An ellipsis approach to Contrastive Left-dislocation. WCCFL 30 (UC Santa Cruz, April 13-15)

2012. Ellipsis in dislocation: PF-deletion without “look-around.” 34. Jahrestagung der DGfS (University of Frankfurt, March 6-9)

2012. Peripheral fragments: Dislocation as ellipsis. 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (Portland, OR, Jan. 5-8)

2011. Split topicalization as symmetry-breaking predicate fronting. ConSOLE XIX (University of Groningen, Jan. 5-8)

2010. The syntax and semantics of genus-species splits in German. CLS 46 (University of Chicago, April 8-10) [with Andreea Nicolae]

2010. The cyclic derivation of free relatives. WCCFL 2010 (University of Southern California, Feb. 19-21)

Teaching

Fall 2012: Introduction to Syntactic Theory

Summer 2012: EGG School in Wroclaw, Poland

For past teaching duties, refer to my CV above.

Dennis Ott