Syntactic theory: Construction-based syntax
I'm investigating the interrelationships of syntax, morphology, and phonology, focusing especially on apparent counterexamples to the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax and the Principle of Morphology-Free Syntax, as well as phenomena (like clitics) that appear to fall within more than one component of grammar.
I'm also doing research on the conceptual foundations of morphology, as well as developing a construction-based framework for syntax and a "realizational" framework for morphology.
More recently (well, since around 1980), I've been investigating syntactic variation, paying attention to small details that mostly don't map easily to large-scale social distinctions like region, sex, class, ethnicity, and so on. As an offshoot of this research, I've also become interested in the "advice literature" on English syntax, and more generally, on material about usage and prescriptivism; and I've returned to earlier interests in style and in mistakes in language.
Papers of mine:
Topics in Sanskrit Phonology, my 1965 Ph.D. dissertation at MIT.
"On invited inferences" by Geis & Zwicky (Linguistic Inquiry, 1971).
"In a manner of speaking", on manner-of-speaking verbs in English (Linguistic Inquiry, 1971).
"Linguistics as chemistry: The substance theory of semantic primes" (A Festschrift for Morris Halle, 1973).
Silva & Zwicky, "Discord", in Fasold & Shuy, Analyzing Variation in Language (1973).
"Hey, whatsyourname!", on vocatives in English (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1974).
"Ambiguity tests and how to fail them"", by Zwicky & Sadock (Syntax and Semantics, 1975).
"Settling on an underlying form: The English inflectional endings" (Cohen & Wirth, 1975).
"This rock and roll has got to stop", on rhyme in rock music (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1976).
"Hierarchies of person" (Chicago Linguistic Society,, 1977).
"On clitics" (Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1977).
"Litmus tests, the Bloomfieldian counterrevolution, and the correspondence fallacy" (Metatheory conference proceedings, 1977)
the booklet Mistakes (Advocate Publishing Group, 1980).
Arnold Zwicky & Ann Zwicky on restaurant menus (American Speech, 1981).
"Word accent, phrase accent, and meter" (Innovations in Linguistics Education, 1982).
"Phonemes and features" (Innovations in Linguistics Education, 1982).
"Stranded to and phonological phrasing in English" (Linguistics, 1982).
Zwicky & Pullum on clitics and inflections (Language, 1983).
"Clitics and particles" (Language, 1985).
"The case against plain vanilla syntax", about unadorned phrase structure grammar and its shortcomings (Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 1985).
"Elementary phonology from an advanced point of view: A gloss on K&K" (Innovations in Linguistics Education, 1985).
"Forestress and afterstress", on accent in English noun-noun compounds (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986).
Pullum & Zwicky, "Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict" (Language, 1986).
Arnold Zwicky & Ann Zwicky on "Patterns first, exceptions later" (Channon & Shockey, To Honor Ilse Lehiste, 1986).
Arnold Zwicky & Elizabeth Zwicky on imperfect puns (Folia Linguistica, 1986).
Zwicky & Pullum on plain and expressive morphology (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1987).
"Rule interactions: Another gloss on K&K" (Innovations in Linguistics Education, 1987).
Pullum & Zwicky, "The syntax-phonology interface" (Newmeyer, Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, 1988).
"Quicker, more quickly, *quicklier", about comparison of adverbs in English (Yearbook of Morphology, 1989).
"What are we talking about when we talk about serial verbs?" (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1990).
Pullum & Zwicky, "A misconceived approach to morphology" (West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 1992).
"Some choices in the theory of morphology" (Levine, Formal Grammar, 1992).
"Dealing out meaning", on construction grammar (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1994).
"What is a clitic?" (in Nevis, Joseph, Wanner, & Zwicky, Clitics Bibliography, 1995).
"Exceptional degree markers: A puzzle in internal and external syntax" (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1995).
"Why English adverbial -ly is not inflectional" (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1995).
Miller, Pullum, & Zwicky, "The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: Four apparent counterexamples in French" (Journal of Linguistics, 1997).
"Two lavender issues for linguists" (Hall & Livia, Queerly Phrased, 1997).
"Same but different", on ways in which a single phonological stem can correspond to material with different syntactic distributions, meanings, or uses (Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 1999).
Pullum & Zwicky, "Gerund participles and head-complement inflection conditions" (Collins & Lee, Huddleston Festchrift, 1999).
"I wonder what kind of construction that this example illustrates" (Beaver et al., The Construction of Meaning, 2002).
"The other F word" (Out, 2003).
Millennial matters, about the meaning of "millennium" (For Bernard Comrie, April 2007).
Course descriptions:
Sophomore Seminar: Split Infinitives, Prepositions at End, and Other Horrors (SP 2005).
Seminar in Morphosyntax: A Cabinet of Curiosities (AU 2005).
Senior Seminar: Innovations: Variation and Change (WI 2007).
Sophomore Seminar: What is the Opposite of Masculine? Gay men and masculinity (SP 2007).
Linguistic Institute: Choosing a Variant: Unfree Variation (SU 2007).
Seminar in Phonology: The Phonology of Syntax (AU 2007).
Undergraduate Introduction: Morphology (WI 2008).
Sophomore Seminar: Slips of the Tongue (SP 2008).
Course materials:
My materials on prescriptivism and usage, for two courses I taught Spring Quarter 2004.
Handouts for my Sophomore Seminar "Split infinitives, prepositions at end, and other horrors" in Spring Quarter 2005.
Materials for LSA.376, "Choosing a variant: Unfree variation" at the 2007 Linguistic Institute.
Materials for a slips of the tongue course.
Abstracts for papers:
The abstract for the 1997 Pullum & Zwicky LSA paper "Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to auxiliary reduction".
An abstract of September 2003 for "Go look at the modern language to test hypotheses about the past", about the history of the Quasi-Serial Verb construction in English.
An abstract of May 2004 for "The shock of the new: Evaluative adjectives are whack!".
An abstract of September 2004 for "Learning from split infinitives".
An abstract of September 2005 for "Forms, constructions, and total syncretism: The case of USETA".
An abstract of July 2006 for "Extris, extris", on extra-is constructions in English.
An abstract of August 2006 for "The natural history of snowclones".
An abstract of August 2006 for "Personal taste and editorial style: however vs. but (by AMZ & Douglas W. Kenter).
An abstract of September 2006 for "Why are we so illuded?", on misperceptions about variation in language.
An abstract of September 2006 for "Metavariation: Variation in advice on variation" (by Thomas A. Grano & AMZ), on advice about choosing between the determiners much and a lot of.
Handouts for conference papers:
The handout for Zwicky & Pullum's 1996 LSA talk "Functional restriction: English possessives".
The handout for my 1999 Forum Lecture at the LSA's Linguistic Institute, on "The grammar and the user's manual".
The handout for my 2000 BLS talk (in the version presented later at Stanford) on "Describing syncretism: Rules of referral after fifteen years".
The handout for a Stanford Syntax Workshop in May 2000, "A-verb-in' we will go", on the syntax of a-prefixing of verbs in various Southern varieties of English.
The handout for my 2001 ICCG talk on "Radical constructionism".
The handout for my 2001 SemFest talk on "Counting Chad", on the count/mass distinction in English, with special reference to chad, e-mail/email, and ice plant.
The handout for my 2002 NWAV talk on "Seeds of variation and change".
The handout for a 2002 Stanford talk, "Just how interesting a construction is this? Explorations in the matching of internal and external syntax".
The handout for my 2002 SemFest talk on "The said and the unsaid", about material in the Atherton (CA) police blotter.
The handout for my presentation at the 2003 IsisFest, on "double is" in English.
The handout for a 2003 Stanford talk, "Some foundational issues for construction grammar: Mutual definition and cluster concepts".
The handout for a 2003 talk at Cornell, "Sounding gay".
The handout for my 2004 SemFest talk, "Isolated NPs".
The handout for my presentation "Toni Morrison's genius puts her in the grammar/usage spotlight" at the January 2005 meeting of the American Dialect Society.
The handout for my presentation "How to name a porn star" at the January 2005 meeting of the American Name Society.
The handout for my presentation "Ideal types: peacocks, chameleons, and centaurs" at the March 2005 SemFest (on categorization in general, and categorization of gay men in particular).
The handout for my presentation "Gonna, Auxiliary Reduction, and two modules of syntactic organization" at the 2005 Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting.
The handout for my November 2005 presentation on dangling modifiers at the Stanford Humanities Center.
The handout for a July 2006 presentation by Thomas Grano and AMZ, "Metavariation: Variation in advice on variation", on much vs. a lot.
The handout for my 2007 SemFest talk, "Extris, extris", on "extra is" constructions in English.
The handout for a 2007 SemFest talk by AMZ and Douglas Kenter, "Avoid vagueness? The case of sentence-initial linking however".
Bibliographies:
The August 2006 McConvell/Zwicky bibliography on Isis.
Isa Buchstaller's 2004 bibliography on quotatives: social and linguistic factors and grammaticalization.
Things by students I've worked with:
Laura Staum's 2004 qualifying paper on the GoToGo construction.
Laura Staum's 2005 qualifying paper on variation in complementizer use.
Current version of Liz Coppock's paper on syntactic blends.
Thomas Grano's 2006 undergraduate honors thesis on pronoun case in coordination.
Book proposal:
The January 2005 proposal for a book "Adventures in the Advice Trade".
Some choices in the theory of morphology. R. Levine (ed.), Formal grammar: Theory and implementation. Oxford Univ. Press (1992) 327-71.(G.K. Pullum & A.M. Zwicky) Condition duplication, paradigm homonymy, and transconstructional constraints. BLS 17 (1991) 252-66.
(G.K. Pullum & A.M. Zwicky) A misconceived approach to morphology. WCCFL 10.387-98 (1992).
Heads, bases, and functors. G.G. Corbett, N. Fraser, & Scott McGlashan (eds.), Heads in grammatical theory. Cambridge Univ. Press (1993) 292-315.
(P.H. Miller, G.K. Pullum, & A.M. Zwicky) Le principe d'inaccesibilite de la phonologie par le syntaxe: trois contre-exemples apparents en francais. Lingvisticae Investigationes 16.2.317-43 (1992).
Dealing out meaning: Fundamentals of syntactic constructions. BLS 20.611-25 (1994).
(J.A. Nevis, B.D. Joseph, D. Wanner, & A.M. Zwicky) Clitics: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1892-1991. John Benjamins (1994).
Why English adverbial -ly is not inflectional. CLS 31.1.523-35 (1995).
Exceptional degree markers: A puzzle in internal and external syntax. OSU WPL 47.111-23 (1995).
(A.L. Halpern & A.M. Zwicky, eds.) Approaching Second: Second position clitics and related phenomena. CSLI Publications (1996).
Two lavender issues for linguists. K. Hall & A. Livia (eds.), Queerly Phrased. Oxford Univ. Press (1997) 21-34.
(P.H. Miller, G.K. Pullum, & A.M. Zwicky) The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: Four apparent counterexamples in French. JL 33.67-90.
(A. Spencer & A.M. Zwicky, eds.) Handbook of Morphology. Blackwell (1997).
(G.K. Pullum & A.M. Zwicky) Gerund participles and head-complement inflection conditions. P. Collins & D. Lee (eds.), The Clause in English. Benjamins (1999) 251-71.
Same but different. University of Illinois Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 29.2.105-10 (1999).
I wonder what kind of construction that this example illustrates. David Beaver, Luis D. Casillas Martinez, Brady Z. Clark, & Stefan Kaufmann (eds.), The Construction of Meaning. CSLI Publications (2002) 219-48.
The other F word. Out 115.82, 84, 140 (June 2003).
(John R. Rickford, Isabelle Buchstaller, Thomas Wasow, & Arnold Zwicky) Intensive and quotative all: Something old, something new, American Speech 82.1.3-31 (2007)..
In 2004-05, at Stanford, I taught: Syntactic Variation (125A/225A, graduate/undergraduate seminar, autumn quarter); Advanced Introduction to Linguistics (201, graduate course, winter quarter); Sophomore Research Seminar: Split Infinitives, Prepositions at End, and Other Horrors (30Q, on prescriptive grammar, spring quarter).
In 2005-06 I was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, working on the "Adventures in the Advice Trade" project (see .pdf link above), and taught one course: Seminar in Morphosyntax: A Cabinet of Curiosities (218, graduate seminar, autumn quarter).
In 2006-07 I taught: Seminar in Syntax: Choosing a Variant (125/225, graduate/undergraduate seminar, autumn quarter); Innovations: Variation and Change (157, undergraduate seminar, winter quarter); Choosing a Variant: Unfree Variation (LSA 376, course at the Linguistic Institute, summer quarter).
In 2007-08 I am scheduled to teach: Seminar in Phonology: The Phonology of Syntax (112/212A, graduate/undergraduate seminar, autumn quarter); Morphology (116, undergraduate introductory course, winter quarter); Sophomore Seminar: Slips of the Tongue (46Q, spring quarter).
I received an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton (1962) and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT (1965). After teaching four years at Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I came to Ohio State in 1969, was named a Distinguished University Professor in 1989, and retired in 1995. Since 1985 I have been a visiting professor at Stanford , and from September 1998 on I am based at Stanford. I have been active in the Linguistic Society of America (and was its president in 1992) and have taught or worked on research projects at many of the Linguistic Institutes of the LSA, from 1968 through 2007; I held the Sapir Professorship at the 1999 Institute, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I am a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1992); of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (elected 1998); and of the Association for Psychological Science (elected 2007). I've held one-year fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Humanities Center, and shorter appointments at Edinburgh, Sussex, and the Beijing Language Institute.
I am an occasional contributor to the Language Log, where lots of interesting linguists muse about things having to do with language; to the American Dialect Society mailing list; and to Chris Waigl's eggcorn database.
I am the founder of the OUTIL (OUT In Linguistics) mailing list, for lgbt(-friendly) linguists. For an extensive bibliography on gay and lesbian language, see the compilation by Gregory Ward. And for links to just about anything of lgb relevance, check out the QRD (Queer Resources Directory). I am also a long-time participant in the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss (Members Of The Same Sex); the most recent faq file for soc.motss has all sorts of useful information about the newsgroup. (The soc.motss archives also include an anthology of my postings about life with my partner, Jacques Transue, during the last 12 years of his life.) And, if that isn't enough, for several years I was a board member of NOGLSTP (the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals).
I have been an enthusiastic singer in the Sacred Harp (Denson Book) shape-note singing tradition since 1989; I sing with groups in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Columbus. All sorts of information about shape-note singing can be found on the FASOLA homepage.
And I am grandfather of the adorable Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky. (Pictures at that site; blogs by her parents here.)
Office address: 2162 Staunton Ct., Palo Alto CA 94306-1438Office phone: (650) 843-0550
Department address: Linguistics, Stanford Univ., Stanford CA 94305-2150. Linguistics office for 2006-07: 124 Margaret Jacks Hall (460-124).
Department phone: (650) 723-4284 (fax (650) 723-5666). Phone in 124 Margaret Jacks Hall: (650) 725-0023.
E-mail: zwicky@csli.stanford.edu
Home address: 722 Ramona St., Palo Alto CA 94301-2547
Home phone: (650) 323-0753
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