Liam Garside
Doctoral Student in Linguistics - Liam’s thesis is entitled 'The Syntax and Semantics of Causative and Perception Verbs in Romance: An Experimental Approach'
Research project title
The Syntax and Semantics of Causative and Perception Verbs in Romance: An Experimental Approach
Supervisors
Prof Michelle Sheehan, Dr Dan Duncan, Dr Gabriel Martinez-Vera + Prof Rob Truswell (Edinburgh)
Contact details
Email: l.garside@newcastle.ac.uk
Research interests
- Formal syntax and semantics
- Language variation and change (particularly socio-syntax)
- Comparative Romance linguistics
A brief outline of my research project
With a focus on the Romance language family, my work investigates the behaviour of causative (“make”/“let”) and perception (“see”/“hear”) verbs. These verbs can select a wide range of infinitival complements that each have their own syntactic properties and express subtly different meanings. There are commonalities across Romance varieties in the distinctions between these constructions, but the borders between them are notably blurred in Spanish, where the different constructions often appear with (near-)identical surface morphology.
My doctoral project develops on the work of my MA dissertation, where I gathered socio-syntactic data to test explanations posited in the literature as to the distinctive behaviour of causative constructions in Spanish. I seek to expand on this work in both breadth and depth for my PhD by (i) studying perception verbs as well as causative verbs, (ii) examining more varieties of Spanish, particularly from Latin America and Northern Spain, (iii) considering other Romance languages that have received less attention, such as Romanian, and (iv) shifting the emphasis of my work from surface-level morphology and word order to the formal syntactic structure of these constructions.
Research activities
Conferences
Sheehan, M. Garside, L. and Sitaridou, I. 2024. Pronoun use in bilingual Portuguese: preliminary findings. Presented at annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), Newcastle, August 2024.
Garside, L. and Duncan, D. 2024. Tyneside English is giving me/us variation in structural case. Presented at annual meeting of The Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), Newcastle, August 2024.
Placements and Funding
Leverhulme Trust, Full PhD Studentship (approx. £73,000 in total)
Newcastle University, School of English, Master’s Dissertation Support Fund (£300)
Awards
'Best Student of Portuguese in the UK 2019' (Melhor aluno de Português no Reino Unido 2019); awarded by the Portuguese Ambassador to the UK on behalf of TROPO UK
Recognised by the Newcastle University Postgraduate Board of Examiners for the best overall performance in Linguistics in 2023/24
Research Groups
Romance Linguistics Circle (RoLinC – Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Newcastle, Bergamo, and Messina)
North-East Syntax Seminar (NESS)
Syntax Reading Group (Newcastle)
Language Variation and Change Research Group (Newcastle)
Outreach Projects
Linguistics and Multilingualism: diversification of the student body on degrees in language and linguistics (led by Dr. Gabriel Martínez Vera and Prof. Michelle Sheehan)