I am a sixth year PhD student in the UCSC Department of Linguistics. I am interested in theoretical syntax, Palauan and other Austronesian languages, linguistic fieldwork/language documentation, and computational linguistics (primarily information retrieval and spoken dialogue applications).
jnuger
ucsc.edu
Contrary to popular belief, I am not Canadian — I was born in Ohio. In English, my name is pronounced ['ʤʌs.tɪn 'nuw.ʤɚ], but it's [ʒys.'tẽ ny.'ʒe] in French. When I'm not doing linguistics, I enjoy reading pretentious novels and unpretentious magazines, discussing complicated things in simple ways, having fun with good friends, and doing just about anything with boisterous, intelligent people. I have lived in Montréal, Micronesia, the South of France, the Deep South, former East Germany, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Watching sports on TV makes me bored, but I like going to games in real life. I love anything hot or cold: e.g., beach days, ski trips, spicy Indian food, popsicles, celebrities, and eskimos. I also enjoy unpredictability and therefore both appreciate and eschew spontaneity, depending on the situation. I become extremely happy during the Olympics, and the rest of my life takes a backseat. I randomly have semi–official certifications in bartending, scuba diving, and German fluency. I've never owned a car, and I don't know how to ride a bicycle. I played trumpet for ten years and then abruptly stopped. I once played an ensemble part in Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre even though I did not understand my Spanish lines. I love rabbits. I don't know what else to write.
Even more about me... (Private)
One of the goals of syntactic theory is to determine to what extent languages have a shared, universal structure and to what extent their structures vary. For instance, it is commonly assumed that all languages have verbs. But how, exactly, are sentences constructed from verbs? Is there one single, uniform way in which sentences are built up from their verbs, or are there language particular differences in how this occurs? If there are such differences, what does the morphology of verbs reveal about them?
To investigate these questions, I will conduct research on the morphology and syntax of verbs in Palauan, an Austronesian language spoken by some 15,000 people in Palau, and examine its implications for syntactic theory. Palauan verbs are unusually morphologically complex. Information about tense, aspect, mood, voice, the subject, and the object is expressed in this language through the use of auxiliary verbs, affixes, and phonological alternations. I will investigate the extent to which the complex morphology of Palauan verbs provides a window into the syntactic structure of its sentences. In the course of this research, I will analyze the properties of various classes of Paluaan verbs, including causatives, applicatives, unaccusatives, unergatives, transitives, and passives.
Over the course of several fieldtrips to Koror, Palau, I will consult with native Palauan speakers at Palau Community College, the Palau Ministry of Education, the Belau National Museum, and elsewhere in the community of Koror. Data will be collected from recorded oral narratives, published texts, and interviews with individual speakers.
Generous financial support for this project has been provided by the U.S. Department of Education (Javits Fellowship #P170B050015), the National Science Foundation (Dissertation Improvement Grant #BCS-0846979), the Institute for Humanities Research at UCSC (Research & Travel Grant), and the UCSC Department of Linguistics (Summer Research Grant). For more detailed information, a revised version of the NSF project description is available.
It's ready. Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax (which I co-edited with Artemis Alexiadou, Jorge Hankamer, Thomas McFadden, and Florian Schäfer) is now available for purchase via the Benjamins website, Amazon, and (probably not) your local bookstore. Coming soon to an academic library near you. Take a peek inside on Google Books.
Syntactic Structure Inside Palauan Resultatives. What descriptive grammarians have called resulting state verbs in Palauan are shown to have syntactic structure beneath the word level. I examine evidence that while the minimal constituents that contain resulting state verbs and their argument(s) have the internal structure of VPs/vPs, they have the distribution and morphosyntactic reflexes of APs/aPs (like simple statives). I propose an analysis in which category-neutral roots combine with their arguments and later merge with a resultative a morpheme (realized as the -(e)l- infix), which may be construed as a "stativizer" that existentially quantifies the event argument of a vP that also contains a target state component (possibly along the lines of Kratzer 2000: 391, ex. 14). To be presented at the 34th Penn Linguistics Colloquium in March 2010.
Aspect in Palauan vP-Internal Syntax: Evidence from Passives. An in-depth investigation into Palauan me- and o- verbs concludes that a subclass of them may be analyzed as passive verbs in Palauan. Evidence for the promotion of the theme DP to subject position comes from three tests: availability of quantifier float, the ability to be co-referent with the causee in Palauan's periphrastic causative construction, and wh-agreement. The structure of passives provides evidence against the analysis of transitive vP of Nuger (2007; see below), and a new analysis is constructed using concepts from Minimalism and Distributed Morphology in Nuger 2008 (Variations on the Palauan Theme).
Palauan's Case-Licensing System. Predicative aspect (i.e. telicity) directly influences the licensing of case on Palauan internal arguments. Verbs morphologically marked as telic bear inflectional suffixes that agree in person, number, and animacy with the direct object, which is the “measurer” of the event (in the sense of Tenny 1987 et seq., Arad 1998). The direct object DP itself is not case-marked. On the other hand, the direct objects of atelic verbs exhibit differential object marking (see Aissen 2003 for extensive discussion). A Minimalist analysis is presented in Nuger 2007 (The Case of Objects), which I have revised in Nuger 2008 (see above). See also Nuger 2009 (On Downward-Entailing Existentials and Differential Object Marking in Palauan).
A CLIR-based Readability Classifier for Chinese. This project utilizes semantically comparable corpora in Chinese and other languages, as well as cross-lingual information retrieval techniques. These, in combination with established readability classification algorithms developed for other languages (e.g. LIX, Flesch-Kincaid, etc.), allow for the classification of texts using familiar indices even in languages for which the algorithms were not designed. The framework is presented in detail in Kirchner, Nuger, and Zhang 2009 (An Extensible Crosslinguistic Readability Framework)
Discontiguous Reduplication. Ulu Muar Malay, Semai, and Nakanai each contain patterns of reduplication in which the monosyllabic reduplicant prefix corresponds with segments at both the left and right edge of the base (at the expense of medial segments). A unified Optimality–Theoretic analysis (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) for the patterns in the three languages is offered in Nuger 2006 (Discontiguous Reduplication). Shorter, revised version that focuses on the Malay data coming soon in Travis et al. (in press), Selected Proceedings of AFLA XIV. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ling 113: Syntax II (planned: Spring 2010). Teaching assistant for Prof. James McCloskey. UCSC.
Ling 52: Syntax I (Winter 2010). Teaching assistant for Prof. Jorge Hankamer. UCSC. [Course Webpage]
Ling 52: Syntax I (Fall 2008). Teaching assistant for Prof. Sandra Chung. UCSC.
Ling 50: Introduction to Linguistics (Summer 2008). Instructor of record. UCSC.
Ling 181: Structure of Romance Languages (Winter 2008). Teaching assistant for Prof. James Isaacs. UCSC.
Ling 20: Introduction to Linguistics (Spring 2007). Teaching assistant for Prof. Geoffrey Pullum. UCSC.
Ling 80V: Structure of the English Vocabulary (Fall 2005). Teaching assistant for Prof. Junko Ito. UCSC.