About me
I am a Language Engineer at Amazon Web Services working on Amazon’s chatbot service, Amazon Lex. Before joining industry I received my PhD at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I was advised by Norbert Hornstein and Howard Lasnik. Here you can find out more about my work and interests as a researcher and teacher.
My research interests are in syntax, acquisition, and parsing.
My primary interest, which I pursued in my dissertation, is in long-distance dependencies. In my eyes, they are one of the magics of linguistic cognition, and perhaps cognition in general. How can certain dependencies span over multiple clause boundaries while most can’t, and when and why do they break down? I looked at wh-quantifier float in German, its evidence for successive cyclic movement through vP, and other properties of wh-movement and German syntax that this phenomenon highlights. One of my favorite aspect is that wh-movement can strand the quantifier alles, but A-movement cannot. (And for anyone interested in Scrambling, my work led me to assume that there is short A-scrambling, and A’-Scrambling to the edge of TP (remeniscent of Lasnik-Saito topicalization in English.)
I am also drawn to the prized question of how language is learned. While I mostly engaged in the tradition of making armchair contributions (What is the range of hypotheses at the Learner’s disposal? — check out the final conclusions of my dissertation!), together with Jeff Lidz and Howard Lasnik, I worked on a project on speaker variation in the grammar of the Exceptional Case Marking construction in English (e.g. they perceived him to be obnoxious) : can we nail down the variation in this construction to two populations, one with an Obligatory Raising grammar and one with an Optional Raising grammar as argued by Howard Lasnik over the years? And can we establish another playground in this domain, where we can study how language learning works when the input underdetermines the outcomes? This is inspirational to me in this respect right now.
In the parsing domain, I have collaborated with Zoe Ovans and Ellen Lau looking into the question of whether there are any grounds to posit continuous representations, the test case being how agreement attraction is judged on a continuous scale. Feel free to contact me if you’d like slides or data from this project!
I was an active member of the Language Science community at Maryland, in outreach, language science lunch talks (not just eating!), and at language science day.
CV
An acade CV can be found here.
Presentations
Talks
[2021]. ‘Why Must Wh-Quantifiers in German Strand with Complex Wh-Phrases?’. Annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) 57, Virtual.
[2019]. ‘Wh-Quantifier Float in German Diagnoses A’-traces and Successive Cyclicity in vP’. Annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 50, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA.
[2017]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control: Extending the Typology of Control in Grammar’. Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) in Asia XI, Singapore.
[2016]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control: A New Form of Control in Grammar’. Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (IATL) 32, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
[2016]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Covert Pronouns in Modal Infinitives License Deep Subject Control in Passives and Proxy Control’. Pronouns: Morphosyntax, Semantics and Processing (PMSSP) in Salvador, Brazil.
[2014]. ‘Hard and Soft Person-Case Constraints’. Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW) 29 in York, UK.
[2013]. ‘The Super-Strong Person-Case Constraint: Scarcity of Resources by Scale-Driven Impoverishment’. Annual Meeting of the DGfS (German Linguistics Association) in Potsdam, Germany. Workshop ‘Interaction of Syntactic Primitives’.
Posters
[2016]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control’. Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW) 31, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
[2016]. ‘The Cazzo-of-N Construction and its Non-Minimal Agreement Pattern in Italian’. Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE) XXIV in York, UK.
[2014]. ‘The Super-Strong Person-Case Constraint: Scarcity of Resources by Scale-Driven Impoverishment’. Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE) XXII in Lisbon, Portugal.
Invited Talks
[2017]. ‘Wh-quantifier floating in German’. Institut für Linguistik, University of Leipzig.
[2016]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control’. Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaften (ZAS) in Berlin.
Publications
Journal Articles
[2021]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control: A new species of control in grammar’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
[under review]. ‘Wh-Quantifier Float in German’. Syntax. (manuscript here)
[under review]. (with Hisao Kurokami) ‘Consequences for Japanese Object Honorification for Phase Minimality’. Linguistic Inquiry squibs. (manuscript here)
Conference Proceedings
[2020]. ‘Wh-Quantifier Float in German’. In: M. Asatryan, Y. Song, A. Whitmal, ed., Proceedings of North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 50. (pre-print; print version here.)
[2017]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control: A New Form of Control in Grammar’. In: N. Brandel, ed., Proceedings of IATL 2016. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 86.
[2017]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control: Extending the Typology of Control in Grammar’. In: M. Y. Erlewine and Y. Sato, eds., Proceedings of GLOW Asia XI, Volume 1. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 84.
[2016]. ‘Agree and Minimality in the DP: The challenge from the Cazzo-of-N construction in Italian’. In: K. Bellamy et al., eds., Proceedings of ConSOLE XXIV in York, pp. 88–111.
[2014]. ‘The Super-Strong Person-Case Constraint: Scarcity of Resources by Scale-Driven Impoverishment’. In: M. Kohlberger et al., eds., Proceedings of ConSOLE XXII in Lisbon, pp. 58–80.
Theses / Qualifying Papers
[2021]. All About Alles: The Syntax of Wh-Quantifier Float in German. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Maryland.
[2019]. Wh-Quantifier Float in German. Major qualifying paper. University of Maryland.
[2016]. Expressive Agreement in Italian. MA thesis. Universität Leipzig.
[2013]. On the Person-Case Constraint: From the Giga to the Zero Version with Copy, Impoverishment and Check. BA thesis. Universität Leipzig.
Working Papers
[2016]. ‘Noun Formation by Verb Reduplication in Italian’. In: K. Barnickel et al., eds., Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 93. University of Leipzig, pp. 215–227.
[2016]. (with Sandhya Sundaresan) ‘Proxy Control: A New Species of Obligatory Control Under Modality’. In: K. Barnickel et al., eds., Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 93. University of Leipzig, pp. 447–482.
[2013]. ‘The Super-Strong Person-Case Constraint: Scarcity of Resources through Scale-Driven Impoverishment’. In: F. Heck and A. Assmann, eds., Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 90. University of Leipzig, pp. 177–201.
Teaching
[2019]. Wh-questions around the world. 400-level undergraduate class, exploring the syntax of wh-expressions. Topics covered: wh-movement, wh-in-situ, optional wh-fronting, echo wh-questions, wh-scope marking and wh-copying; what is(n’t) movement? 10 students. Fall semester. University of Maryland.
A shout-out to my amazing cohort. Check out their work here: Sigwan Thivierge, Mina Hirzel, Anouk Dieuleveut, Rodrigo Ranero, Tyler Knowlton.
Aaron Doliana 