Bernadette Plunkett

I did my first degree (in Linguistics) at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and then an MA at UCL. Later I went to the US where I did a PhD in theoretical syntax at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst working with Edwin Williams, David Pesetsky and Peggy Speas. My thesis was called 'Specifiers and Subject Positions'.

I came to the University of York in 1993. I teach courses in Syntax, Language Acquisition and French Linguistics.

I am a member of the North Eastern Language Acquisition Group (NELAG) a discussion group which meets several times a year. Click here for more information on NELAG.

I am one of the founder members of the York Syntax Reading Group part of the York Research Group in Syntax and Semantics.

Click here for the home page of the Syntax and Semantics Research Group.

I am currently organiser of the department's Year Away programme for students doing degrees in French and Linguistics.

Research Interests

• Syntactic analysis within the Principles and Parameters approach working mostly on French and English. I have a particular interest in the syntax of questions.

• The Acquisition of Syntax, especially the First Language Acquisition of French.

Data

• The York Corpus of Child French was collected under my direction for an ESRC-funded projection on the Acquisition of Wh-questions. It consists of data from three young French-speaking children from different areas of the French speaking world, Canada, Belgium and France. Full details of the project under which the corpus was collected can be found here. Details of the corpus can be found here.

I can be contacted at:

Department of Language and Linguistic Science University of York Heslington York Y010 5DD

Tel: (01904) 432676 Fax: (+44) 1904 432673 e-mail: bp4@york.ac.uk

To Language & Linguistic Science Home Page

Bernadette Plunkett 24/10/02