Craig Sailor
Assistant Professor in Linguistics
craig.sailor@tcd.ie
Trinity College Dublin
About
I do theoretical linguistics, a branch of cognitive science. Human cognition is modular, and our language faculty is too: syntax, phonology, and semantics are distinct computational systems that each work with their own unique set of mental symbols, yet somehow they collaborate in deriving linguistic expressions (words, sentences, etc.). I'm interested in how linguistic modules are — and aren't! — able to "talk" to each other for this purpose. Making progress on this question will help us understand why human languages work the way they do...and why they don't work the way they can't.
I'm particularly interested in how the output of the syntactic computation makes its way into the phonology module. In other words, I work on the syntax-phonology interface (with morphology in there somewhere too). A favorite topic of mine in this research area is ellipsis, and what it can tell us about how abstract syntactic structures get mapped onto phonological strings. I've also been thinking about linguistically-significant gestures in this regard (see the Gestural Grammar Lab here at Trinity for more).
Nobody ever just works on one thing, though, and one of my other major research interests is in the syntax of non-standard English dialects, especially in Britain and Ireland.