Syntactic variation in American English

Dissertation Research

Publications

• Matyiku, Sabina. 2017. Semantic effects of head movement: Evidence from negative auxiliary inversion. Yale University dissertation.
• Matyiku, Sabina. 2016. Semantic effects of head movement in negative auxiliary inversion constructions. In Christopher Hammerly & Brandon Pricke (eds.), NELS 46: Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 2, 355–364. Amherst, Massachusetts: Graduate Linguistics Student Association.

Presentations

• “Deriving Not-initial constructions by movement of sentential negation.” Presentation, Syntax Semantics Seminar, UCLA (Feb. 2016) [handout]
• “Semantic effects of head movement in Negative Auxiliary Inversion constructions.” Poster, 46th North East Linguistics Society (NELS 46), Concordia University (Oct. 2015) [poster]
• “Negative auxiliary inversion as an instance of overt quantifier raising.” Presentation, Syntax Brown Bag, NYU (Feb 2015) [handout]
• “Scope economy and the head movement of negation.” Presentation, Syntax Semantics Seminar, UCLA (Apr 2014) [handout]
• “Semantic effects of head movement in Negative Auxiliary Inversion constructions”. Presentation, 32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 32), University of Southern California (Mar 2014) [handout]
• “Motivating movement: The case of negative inversion in West Texas English.” Presentation, 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (25-SCL), University of Iceland (May 2013) [handout]
• “A semantic effect of head movement: The case of negative inversion in West Texas English.” Poster, Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW 36), Lund University (Apr. 2013) [poster]
• “Motivating movement: The case of negative inversion in West Texas English.” Presentation, Friday Lunch Talk, Yale University (Nov. 2011) [Qualifying paper]

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project

Articles

• Matyiku, Sabina. 2018. Negative inversion. Article written for the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. (Older version available at http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/negative-inversion).
• Matyiku, Sabina. 2011. A-prefixing. In Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (Phenomena). http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/a-prefixing.
• Matyiku, Sabina. 2011. Negative concord. In Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (Phenomena). http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/negative-concord.

Presentations

• “Grammatical Diversity in the US.” Presentation, Friday Lunch Talk, Yale University (Sep. 2011) [with N. Huang, Z. Maher, R. Zanuttini]
• “Toward an atlas of micro-syntactic variation in varieties of English.” Presentation, Friday Lunch Talk, Yale University (Feb. 2011) [with N. Huang, Z. Maher, R. Zanuttini]
• “Toward an atlas of micro-syntactic variation in varieties of English.”  Presentation, LSA Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh (Jan. 2011) [with N. Huang, Z. Maher, R. Zanuttini]

Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science

In my qualifying paper, I trained a connectionist model on local wh-movement to generalize to long-distance movement.

• “The Acquisition of Wh-movement by Simple Recurrent Networks.” Presentation, Friday Lunch Talk, Yale University (Dec. 2012) [Qualifying paper]

In the computational and cognitive science classes I’ve taken at Yale, I conducted experiments modeling computational processes and I refined the models on the basis of insights from human behavioral data. For the modeling and statistical analyses, I used Python, R, Matlab, Haskell, and Prolog.

Additional research

• “Reanalyzing verb movement in Romanian compound tenses.” Presentation, SYNC Conference, Stony Brook University (Dec. 2010)
• “Left vs Right Dislocation in Romanian.” Presentation, Linguistics Students Symposium, Concordia University (Mar. 2009)
• “The Puzzle of (Dis)agreement in Marshallese Unaccusative Sentences.”  Poster, Undergraduate Research Day, Concordia University (Apr. 2008)
• “(Dis)agreement of Postverbal Subjects in Marshallese Intransitives.”  Presentation, McGill’s Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates, McGill University (Mar. 2008)
• “Topic and Focus Interpretations of Leftward Subjects in Romanian.”  Presentation, Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics Fall Symposium, Concordia University (Dec. 2007)
• “An analysis of Dislocated Subjects in Romanian.”  Presentation, Concordia Undergraduate Syntax Workshop, Concordia University (Nov. 2007)