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 (March 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.

Survey Article (invited, in prep). Perspective shift vs. indexical shift. Annual Review of Linguistics. Vol. 7.

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.

Research collaboration (in prep). Finiteness & complementation vs. adjunction, with Thomas McFadden & Susi Wurmbrand.

Recent & Upcoming:

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

Journal article (now out!). A curious A/A-bar non-interaction in Tamil double-object constructions. Snippets 38: 15-17. DOI: [PDF]

Volume article (now out!): Distinct featural classes of anaphor in an enriched person system, In Peter W. Smith, Johannes Mursell & Katharina Hartmann (eds.), Agree to Agree: Agreement in Minimalism, 425–461. Language Science Press, Berlin. [PDF]

Conference Talk (March 5, 2020): Adjunct islands and the interplay of theoretical and empirical factors in refining universal claims (with Thomas McFadden and Hedde Zeijlstra). Workshop (AG 4): Empirical consequences of universal claims in grammatical theorizing. DGfS 2020. University of Hamburg. [Slides, PDF]

Keynote Talk (upcoming in June, 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.

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?