Frances Dowle (UK)

I completed my undergraduate degree in Spanish and Linguistics at Jesus College, Oxford and my MPhil – as an Ertegun scholar -  in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at Somerville College. I am now studying for a DPhil at Worcester College, Oxford.

 

My research focuses particularly on the syntax of Welsh, and what this can reveal about interfaces between syntax and other modules of language, especially the phonology-syntax interface. This means that I am interested in how different aspects of language (especially how we build sentences and how we package linguistic information into sound) interact.

 

For my MPhil thesis, I focused on different types of index agreement controllers in Welsh, and provided an analysis which captures the non-agreement of nouns and independent pronouns with index agreement targets such as verbs and prepositions. In other words, I provided a theoretical model which explains what information we might have represented in our minds that results in only some types of pronouns triggering agreement between, for instance, verbs and their subjects, or between prepositions and their objects.. My (open-access) article based on this work can be found here: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/lfg/index.php/main/article/view/14.

 

Welsh agreement continues to be an area of interest in my DPhil research, as I look to explore in more depth how we might choose between competing possible analyses of agreement and non-agreement in modern Welsh. I also hope to look at the development of the modern language from Middle Welsh and explain how the language has changed over time.