Lasnik has been a prominent contributor to the syntax literature within a Chomskyan framework, and is one of only a few linguists to have co-written articles with Noam Chomsky.[2][3] He describes himself as a "conservative" who often finds himself "trying to resurrect old analyses or maintain current analyses that are being supplanted."[4] Topics he has worked on include anaphora, ellipsis, and Case theory.
Outside linguistics, Lasnik is a Scottish dancer and a table-tennis player.[5][6] He has also been known as a skilled teacher, both in syntax and in dancing.[7] Two of his semester-long classes have been transcribed as books and published, including interchanges with students.[8][9] He has also written about his teaching philosophy.[10] He has supervised or co-supervised over 65 dissertations.[11]
Work
Lasnik's dissertation was on the syntax of English negation.[12]
In Binding Theory, Lasnik has been a prominent advocate of an approach to syntactic binding which places an emphasis on semantic reference. He takes the possibility of coreference and disjoint reference to be the targets of explanation in Binding Theory, rather than mere co-indexation.[13] This has led to an incorporation of epithets in formal analyses of anaphora.
He has written extensively on ellipsis phenomena, including sluicing, pseudogapping, and VP-ellipsis.[14] He has advocated a view where the rules of syntax may generate structures which violate syntactic constraints (such as syntactic islands), as long as later operations amend the offending material (at least for some syntactic constraints, such as Subjacency, but not others, like the Empty Category Principle).[15]
↑ Chomsky, Noam; Lasnik, Howard (1977). "Filters and Control". Linguistic Inquiry (8): 425–504.
↑ Chomsky, Noam; Lasnik, Howard. "The theory of Principles and Parameters". In Jacobs, J.; von Stechow, A.; Sternefeld, W.; etal. (eds.). Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research. Berlin: de Gruyter.
↑ Lasnik, Howard (2003). Minimalist Investigations in Linguistic Theory. Routledge. p.4. ISBN0-415-18194-1.
↑ Lasnik, Howard; Uriagereka, Juan (1990). A course in GB syntax: lectures on binding and empty categories. Current studies in linguistics (3. pred.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT-Pr. ISBN978-0-262-12130-9.
↑ Lasnik, Howard; Depiante, Marcela; Stepanov, Arthur (2000). Syntactic structures revisited: contemporary lectures on classic transformational theory. Current studies in linguistics series. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN978-0-262-62133-5.
Lasnik, Howard; Uriagereka, Juan (2005). A course in Minimalist Syntax: Foundations and prospects. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN0-631-19988-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.