I’m working on my PhD thesis which deals with morphosyntactic and semantic composition of highly referential (definite and/or topical) nominal expressions from a micro-comparative perspective.

Informally speaking, languages differ with respect to the primary dimension along which their nominal expressions can be “oriented”: either they grammatically mark the relation between the denotation of the nominal expressions and the real world (reference resolution of all sorts) or they mark the relation between the relevant referent and other nominal denotations in the discourse (information structure status of all sorts). The former group of languages is represented in my work by the Mainland North Germanic languages, whereas the latter by a number of Finno-Ugric languages.

I’m working on matching up morphosyntactic, semantic and phonological properties of functional heads involved in both strategies (for instance, D in reference-oriented languages and Poss(essive) in information structure-oriented ones) in closely related languages which manifest fine distinctions between how their nominal expressions are built.

I’m also looking at how these functional heads interact with other components of nominal expressions that can influence computation of the semantics along the relevant dimensions such as adjectives and quantifiers. Finally, I’m interested in the transitions from one orientation to another. Such phenomena as (absence of) polydefiniteness, determiner omission, clitisization within DP, adjective movement are among the issues that I’m trying to incorporate into a larger theory of highly referential nominal expressions.