Gunlög Josefsson

My main research area presently is the interface between prosody and syntax. I work in a generative framework, and in this tradition the mainstream idea is that syntax feeds prosody. The new ideas that come forward reverse this order, and assumes that at least some word order phenomena can be explained in terms of prosody feeding word order. According to a strong version of this view, all word order phenomena are triggered by prosody, which is an exciting prospective, although we are not there yet. I have worked for some time in a project, together with Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Ben Gurion University, and Björn Köhnlein, Ohio State University, in a project where we try to explain Object Shift, especially why it is obligatory in some of the Mainland Scandinavian varieties, but optional in others in terms of prosody.

Another project, where I work together with Katarina Lundin deals with teaching and learning grammar at university level. Many students find the subject very difficult, and in our project we try to find out exactly what moments or line of thoughts that make it so hard. We are in the process of writing a book where we present our findings. Hopefully this will help teachers of Swedish, teacher students and other students in learning grammar.

A small project is to explain the substandard plural form -sar, for example bastusar ’saunas’ and avokadosar ’avocados’ (cf. the singular forms bastu and avokado). Here too I present an explanation in terms of properties of the interface between phonology and morphology.