Dr. Dominique Sportiche

Biography

Dominique Sportiche is a Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1984. His research specializes in formal syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. Sportiche's work examines the properties of constituent structure and sentence formation, exploring how these relate to meaning, grammar, and human cognition. He focuses on French Romance languages and how they inform the general architecture of syntactic theory. His published studies cover topics such as phrase structure, agreement, clitics, and reconstruction phenomena. His current theoretical interests include the functional sequence and internal structure of verb phrases, binding theory, and mechanisms underlying reconstruction in syntax. His empirical perspective encompasses the syntax of English, French, and other Romance languages, addressing themes such as complementizers, relative pronouns, reflexive constructions, and binding principles. In addition to theoretical syntax, he investigates the connection between linguistic theory and linguistic impairments, particularly in relation to Huntington’s disease, and the early acquisition of syntax in children. Sportiche is also a co-author of "Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory," an introductory textbook on modern syntactic analysis.

Research Interests

Courses