Sandhya Sundaresan

Sandhya Sundaresan. Linguist.

I am a syntactician and fieldworker. One of the languages I focus on is Tamil, a Non-IndoEuropean language of the Dravidian family, which I also speak natively.

Curriculum Vitae (August 2020)

Ongoing:

Monograph (under contract). The Syntax of Perspectival Anaphora, Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, OUP.

Journal article (under review). A new theory of indexical shift. [draft, PDF]

Handbook article (invited, in prep). Probes & Goals. Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism. CUP.

Journal article (in prep). “The AAE and its consequences for the syntax of agreement and anaphora” (with Hedde Zeijlstra). Glossa Special Collection: The Grammar of Agree(ment) and Reference.

Journal article (in prep). "Unifying species of complementiser agreement" (with Thomas McFadden).

Research collaboration (in prep). Selective opacity and selectional asymmetries, with Thomas McFadden, Robert Truswell & Hedde Zeijlstra. [Cambridge Guest-Course Slides, PDF].

Research collaboration (in prep). Anaphor Agreement Effect (phase II), with Hedde Zeijlstra.

Recent & Upcoming:

Survey Article (invited, To Appear (2021)). Shifty attitudes: indexical shift vs. perspectival anaphora. Annual Review of Linguistics. Vol. 7. [draft, PDF]

Journal article (accepted). Proxy Control: a new species of control in grammar (with Aaron Doliana). NLLT.

Keynote Talk (upcoming in November, 2020): TBD. Workshop on Aspect and Argument Structure of Adverbs/Adjectives and Prepositions/Participles (WASSAP5). Research Center on Basque Language (IKER), CNRS. Bayonne, Basque Country.

Keynote Talk (upcoming in May 2021): TBD. 57th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 57). University of Chicago.

In 2019, I was one of four scientists in Germany awarded the Maria Weber Grant -- a research sabbatical prize for a full year -- by the Hans Böckler Stiftung. To read the write-up (in German) on their website about my research, click here.

I received my Ph.D. in 2013, jointly from the University of Tromsø and the University of Stuttgart. From October 2013- early January 2020, I worked as Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessorin) in Syntax at the University of Leipzig. I live in Berlin, but travel to India whenever I can.

You can reach me at: sandhya@sndrsn.org

My research program explores two broad questions:

For a given grammatical phenomenon, what is the nature of interaction and division of labor between syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, within a modular grammar?
What can dialectal and crosslinguistic variation tell us about how a given phenomenon should be syntactically modelled?