María Luisa Rivero

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High Applicatives and Aspect in Romance, Slavic, and the Balkans: synchrony and diachrony. (2009-2012)	Adopting a generative perspective, this project compares Romance, Slavic, and languages of the Balkan region that differ in challenging ways from intensely studied languages. It concentrates on (1) Aspect, both of the Viewpoint/external type and the Situation/internal type, and (2) Applicative / noncore arguments in the sentence. It explores interactions and crosslinguistic variation in both space and time in the morphology, syntax, and semantics of the two mentioned categories. The study of Aspect has a long tradition in Slavic, Romance, and Greek. By contrast, Applicatives arguments have long held the attention of Africanists and specialists of Amerindian languages, but Indoeuropeanists have noticed them only in the recent past. The study of a large variety of Balkan, Romance, and Slavic constructions that combine aspectual and applicative categories can open new windows in a search for morphological, syntactic, and semantic principles , and thus may contribute to our understanding of Universal Grammar. (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant # 410-2009-0828))
Unexpected Modality. (2010-2013)	This project investigates modality in relatively unstudied languages, adopting a comparative perspective within generative grammar and formal semantics. Many early theories of modality influenced by formal logic and philosophy have had access to a relatively narrow range of data, but there is much current interest in developing frameworks that pay closer attention to the relation between meaning and structure, so as to be able to better accommodate variations in the expression of modality across languages. This project will adopt a comparative methodology with data from Slavic, Romance, Balkan, and Amerindian languages from both North and South America. The study of languages of the same family (within the Slavic or Romance families, for example) is important because it will allow us to investigate microvariation within modal systems. The comparison of languages from different families (from Slavic and various Amerindian families, for example) is necessary to identify what is universal in language regarding the expression of modality. Our hypothesis is that once we look carefully at a varied range of languages, we see that modality can be found in rather 'unexpected' places, with a wider distribution than was previously thought, and on a larger set of syntactic categories than those found in intensely studied languages. Main Investigator: Ana Arregui. Coinvestigators: M. L. Rivero, A. Salanova. (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant # 410-2010-2040))

High Applicatives and Aspect in Romance, Slavic, and the Balkans: synchrony and diachrony.
(2009-2012)

Adopting a generative perspective, this project compares Romance, Slavic, and languages of the Balkan region that differ in challenging ways from intensely studied languages. It concentrates on (1) Aspect, both of the Viewpoint/external type and the Situation/internal type, and (2) Applicative / noncore arguments in the sentence. It explores interactions and crosslinguistic variation in both space and time in the morphology, syntax, and semantics of the two mentioned categories. The study of Aspect has a long tradition in Slavic, Romance, and Greek. By contrast, Applicatives arguments have long held the attention of Africanists and specialists of Amerindian languages, but Indoeuropeanists have noticed them only in the recent past. The study of a large variety of Balkan, Romance, and Slavic constructions that combine aspectual and applicative categories can open new windows in a search for morphological, syntactic, and semantic principles , and thus may contribute to our understanding of Universal Grammar.
(Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant # 410-2009-0828))

Unexpected Modality.
(2010-2013)

This project investigates modality in relatively unstudied languages, adopting a comparative perspective within generative grammar and formal semantics. Many early theories of modality influenced by formal logic and philosophy have had access to a relatively narrow range of data, but there is much current interest in developing frameworks that pay closer attention to the relation between meaning and structure, so as to be able to better accommodate variations in the expression of modality across languages. This project will adopt a comparative methodology with data from Slavic, Romance, Balkan, and Amerindian languages from both North and South America. The study of languages of the same family (within the Slavic or Romance families, for example) is important because it will allow us to investigate microvariation within modal systems. The comparison of languages from different families (from Slavic and various Amerindian families, for example) is necessary to identify what is universal in language regarding the expression of modality. Our hypothesis is that once we look carefully at a varied range of languages, we see that modality can be found in rather 'unexpected' places, with a wider distribution than was previously thought, and on a larger set of syntactic categories than those found in intensely studied languages.
Main Investigator: Ana Arregui. Coinvestigators: M. L. Rivero, A. Salanova.
(Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant # 410-2010-2040))