Research Team

Raffaella Zanuttini

Membership: 2010-present (founding member)

Raffaella Zanuttini began working in micro-comparative syntax by studying minimal variations in the expression of sentential negation within the Romance language family, including many non-standard varieties spoken in Northern Italy (see Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages, Oxford University Press). In this project, she extends the study of micro-syntactic differences to varieties of English spoken in North America. Along with Larry Horn, she co-edited the volume Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press.

Laurence Horn

Membership: 2011-present

Larry Horn is a longtime member of the American Dialect Society, to whose e-mail list he is a frequent contributor. He has written on personal datives, positive anymore, lexicography, and the role of semantics and pragmatics in the grammar of negation and polarity. His publications include A Natural History of Negation (Chicago, 1989), The Handbook of Pragmatics (Blackwell, 2004), and The Expression of Negation (De Gruyter, 2010). Along with Raffaella Zanuttini, he co-edited the volume Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press.

Jim Wood

Membership: 2012-present

Jim Wood is an associate professor. His research interests are in syntactic theory, Icelandic morphosyntax, syntax-semantics interface, syntax-morphology interface, and dialect syntax. He has worked on the New England so don’t I construction and verbal rather, among other topics he has pursued or is currently pursuing in English dialect syntax. He has also worked on syntactic variation in Icelandic, including variation in subject-verb agreement, figure reflexive constructions, and dative-nominative constructions.

Carolina Fraga

Membership: 2021-present

Carolina Fraga received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2023. She is interested in theoretical syntax in general, and in the syntax of Spanish in particular. She has worked on spatial prepositions in Spanish and on quantifiers, and is currently doing research on the completive all/todo construction (Tenés toda arena en el pelo./You have all sand in your hair.) in both Spanish and English.

Linda Do

Membership: 2023-present

Linda is a sophomore in Yale College planning to double major in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and Linguistics. She is interested in syntactic variation and crosslinguistic influence, especially in regards to American English. With the YGDP, she has been working on lonely transitives and hopes to look into the hella construction.

Guilherme M. C. Pereira

Membership: 2023-present

Guilherme Pereira is a junior in Yale College majoring in Linguistics. He is primarily interested in syntax (especially that of American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects), as well as phonology and dialect mapping. He is currently working on maps for the “one” construction (for example, He was in Tennessee or Kentucky, one), and he has also worked on social media posts that synthesize information from YGDP pages to raise awareness about the systematicity of stigmatized language varieties.

Squid Tamar-Mattis

Membership: 2023-present

Squid Tamar-Mattis is a PhD student in Linguistics at Yale from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is interested in syntax, morphology and semantics. He has studied variation in the have yet to and try and constructions, as well as quantifier constructions like a many of a time. Outside of YGDP, he also works on variation in Person-Case Constraint repair strategies in Basque.

David Garsten

Membership: 2024-present

David is a sophomore in Yale College majoring in Linguistics. He is interested in grammaticalization and morphosyntactic evolution, language revitalization and documentation, and using computational tools to bridge the gap between linguistics and animal communication. He is currently researching the it’s giving and just screams constructions.

Ella Moran

Membership: 2024-present

Ella Moran is a sophomore in Yale College majoring in Linguistics and pursuing a certificate in Data Science. She is interested in syntax, semantics, and dialect mapping. Currently, she is working on the “lonely transitive” construction, as in “I have an apple. Do you want?”