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Phil Branigan

Professor

Department of Linguistics
Memorial University
St. John's, NL
Canada A1B 3X9

I was first introduced to Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, where I completed an MA in 1988. In 1992, I obtained my Ph.D at MIT. I got a job at Memorial University, in St. John's, Newfoundland soon after, and I've been enjoying life here ever since. Weather aside, it's a great place to live and work.

I am a syntactician, so I obsess over how different languages use different word orders and and word structures to express similar ideas. Most of my active research falls into two broad categories: syntactic theory and Algonquian linguistics. They aren't mutually exclusive, but when I'm being a "pure" syntactician, I'm often looking at word order in the left periphery of clauses in European languages. And when I'm focused on Algonquian, I'm often trying to figure out how the complex morphology arises from deeper universal syntactic patterns. Much of my work on Algonquian is done with my MUN colleagues: Marguerite MacKenzie, Julie Brittain, and Carrie Dyck.

A fair bit of what I've been studying for the last decade involves the operation of multiple head-movement, which turns out to be a central feature of Algonquian morpho-syntax. (It matters in other languages, too, particularly Slavic languages.) The results of this research are gathered up in The Grammar of Multiple Head-Movement.

Recently, Nick Welch and I have been exploring the role played by multiple head-movement in Athapaskan grammars. Stay tuned for the results!