Phon Home| Courses| Research| Resources & Tools| Events| About Us| Shop

Reiko Vermeulen Postdoctoral Researcher UCL Linguistics Chandler House 2 Wakefield Street London WC1N 1PF UK

r.vermeulen AT ucl.ac.uk

As of September 2009, I am a postdoc at the University of Ghent, Belgium, where I am working as part of an FWO-funded project Comparative syntax. Layers of structure and the cartography project. For my most recent list of works and activities, please visit me here

I was a post doc at UCL until August 2009 - that's why my homepage is still here. I was part of the AHRC-funded project A flexible theory of topic and focus movement. My current research on information structure, which I started while at UCL, is concerned mainly with the syntax of topics and foci and their interaction with each other in Japanese and Korean, and what the findings can tell us about the interface between syntax and information structure.

My PhD thesis deals with the phenomenon of external possession in Japanese and Korean, in which a possessor of a subject or an object appears as and behaves like an additional argument of the verb. The thesis argues that the phenomenon is licensed by a thematic operation, rather than by a specific functional projection or movement of the possessor. Moreover, external possession in Japanese takes the form of a multiple nominative construction. I claim that there are at least two further types of multiple nominative constructions in this language and explore the intricate relation between the nominative case marker ga and focus interpretation in these constructions.

Papers   ●   PhD Thesis   ●   Presentations

Papers

Manuscripts

• [With Ad Neeleman, Hans van de Koot and Elena Titov] A syntactic typology of topic, focus and contrast.
• Topics in Japanese: A unified analysis of contrastive and non-contrastive topics. Ms. UCL

  Posted 25 Sept 2008 - this version has the infelicities of examples (44)/(45) in the previous version amended

In press

• Non-topical wa-phrases in Japanese. In Folli, Rafaella and Christiane Ulbrich(ed.) Interfaces in Linguistics: New Research Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [semi-final draft]

This paper is based on the talk presented at OnLI conference in Belfast, June 2007.

2009

• On the Syntax of External Possession in Korean. In Takubo, Yukinori (ed.) Japanese / Korean Linguistics 16. Stanford: CSLI Publications. [semi-final draft]
• Topics, Contrast and Contrastive Topics in Japanese. In Vermeulen, Reiko and Ryoskuke Shibagaki (eds.) MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 58: Proceedings to the 5th Workshop on Altaic FormalLinguistics (WAFL 5), 361-372.

2008

• Nonconstituent coordination in Japanese: a case of phonological reordering. In Linguistic Inquiry39, 345-354.
  Downloadable from the journal's website.

2007

• Japanese wa-phrases that aren't topics. In Breheny, Richard and Nikolaos Velegrakis (eds) UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 19, 183-201.

2006

• Case and Coordination in Japanese. In Baumer, Donald, David Montero and Michael Scanlon (eds.) Proceedings of WCCFL 25, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, 28-30 April 2006, 417-425.
  Downloadable from http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/25/index.html

2005

• Non-constituent coordination in Japanese. In Harbour, D. (ed.) Queen Mary, Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics.
• External possession in Korean. In Neeleman, A., and N. Topintzi (eds.) UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 17, 175-213. 
• Possessive and adjunct multiple nominative constructions in Japanese. Lingua 115, 1329-1363.
  Downloadable from the journal's website.
• Some peculiarities of Japanese nominative. Papers in Linguistics of the University of Manchester,45-57.
• Review of Functional Structure(s), Form and Interpretation: Perspectives from East Asian Languages. Yen-hui Audrey Li and Andrew Simpson (eds.) In Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 68, 187-189.
• Two types of multiple nominative constructions. Proceedings of the 28^th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, University of Pennsylavania, Philadelphia, USA, 27-29 February 2004, 305-319.

2002

• Ga ga constructions in Japanese. In Neeleman, A., and R. Vermeulen (eds.) UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14, 417-456.
• Multiple nominative constructions in Japanese. In Cazzoli-Goeta, M., S. Pourcel and L. Van Espen (eds.) Fifth Durham Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics: Conference Proceedings, 7-8 June 2002, 224-233.

PhD Thesis

The Syntax of External Possession: Its Basis in Theta-Theory
April 2005, University College London

Preliminaries

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: External Possession in Japanese

Chapter 3: Other Types of Multiple Nominative Constructions

Chapter 4: External Possession in Korean

Chapter 5: Multiple Specifiers vs. Multiple Heads

Chapter 6: Conclusion

References

Presentations

2009

• 'On the typology of topic marking: Case studies in Japanese and Korean.' Invited talk at the University of Potsdam, Germany, 16 July.[handout]

2008

• 'The particle wa and the syntax of topics in Japanese.' Invited talk at the University of Southern California, U.S.A., 2 December.
• 'The particle wa and the syntax of topics in Japanese.' Invited talk at Syntax and Semantics Seminar, University of California Los Angeles, U.S.A., 3 October.
• 'The distribution of topics in Japanese.' Parallel Session on Information Structure at the 18th International Congress of Linguists, CIL18, Seoul, Korea, 21-26 July.
• 'Topics, contrast and contrastive topics in Japanese.' Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) 5, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK, 23-25 May.[handout]
• 'The syntax of topics in Japanese.' Panel Session on Topicality at the 30th Annual Convention of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS), Bamberg, Germany, 27-29 February.[handout]
• 'The syntactic distribution of contrastive topics in Japanese.' (alternate) Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 34, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 8-10 February.

2007

• 'The particle wa and the syntax of topic in Japanese.' Invited talk at Graduate Seminar, University of Oxford, UK, 22 October.
• 'On the topic of wa-phrases in Japanese.' Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), King's College London, UK, 29 August-1 September.
• 'Non-topical wa-phrases in Japanese.' On Linguistic Interfaces (OnLI), University of Ulster, Belfast, U.K., 1-3 June.
• 'Japanese wa-phrases that aren't topics.' Information Structure / Syntax Workshop, Queen Mary, University of London, UK, 23-25 February.

2006

• 'Licensing external possession in Korean.' International Conference on East Asian Linguistics,University of Toronto, Canada, 10-12 November.
• 'On the syntax of external possession in Korean.' The 16th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, Kyoto University, Japan, 7-9 October.
• 'Case and Coordination in Japanese.' WCCFL 25, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, 28-30 April.

2005

• 'External Possession and (Non-)Affectedness in Korean.' Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Cambridge, UK, 31 August-3 September.
• 'Two Types of Multiple Nominative Constructions.' The 28th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA,27-29 February.
• 'Two Types of Multiple Nominative Constructions.' Trans Seminar in Syntax and Semantics, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, 11 February.

2003

• 'Possessive and Adjunct Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese' Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Sheffield, UK, 14-16 April.
• 'Possessive and Adjunct Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese' The 12th Manchester Postgraduate Linguistics Conference, University of Manchester, UK, 12 April.

2002

• 'Ga Ga Constructions in Japanese' Doctoral Workshop on Japanese Linguistics, University of Oxford, UK, 15-21 September.
• 'Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese' The Fifth Durham Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Durham, UK, 7-8 June.

last modified September 2009