School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Academic & Teaching staff
Dr Diane Nelson
Senior Lecturer
Interests in theoretical syntax (particularly the syntax-morphology interface and the relationship between argument structure and event structure); Case Theory; psych predicates; language evolution; endangered languages; syntactic language disorders; Finnish, Inari Sami, Icelandic, Turkish, Khalkh Mongolian. Diane is happy to consider applications for postgraduate research in any of these areas.
Diane is involved in several ongoing collaborative research projects. These include collaborative work on the syntax and semantics of Finnish and Estonian passives and impersonals with colleagues in the US, Sweden and Estonia; fieldwork and analysis of the endangered language Inari Saami (spoken in Northern Finland) with Ida Toivonen of Carleton University; and a project with Vesna Stojanovik of Reading University that uses eye tracking experiments to investigate the way children with William's Syndrome process syntax. She is due to publish The birth and death of language with Blackwell.