Daniel Greeson

he/him/his

Me in the trees. (📸: Félix Fonseca.)

hi! oi! ¡holis!

I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University, which I joined in 2021, and am co-advised by Paco Ordóñez and Sandhya Sundaresan. My primary research interest is syntax and its interfaces with semantics and phonology, and I tend work a lot on Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

I am currently working on my doctoral thesis about syntactic locality and thematic structure, Raising, un-roled: A-movement and the θ-criterion. I previously completed a BA–MA program in Linguistics at Michigan State University, advised by Cristina Schmitt. My MA thesis focused on the syntactic and semantic properties of pronouns in Romance languages. While at MSU, I also worked in the MSU Language Acquisition Lab to look at how kids learn the different properties of subject pronouns in Spanish.

I love showing that deep down, all languages share many deep similarities with each other despite an incredible amount of variation in the surface. A lot of my work on variation comes from Romance languages, but I also think it can be fun to take a closer look at boring old English and convince people that it has fun things like nasal harmony and hyperraising.

Me in another kind of tree!

(text: Daniel it seems is happy.)

New! My Snippet about hyperraising and minimality is now out!

Full text

New! Two new papers about the distribution of null case markers are up on Lingbuzz!

New! I recently successfully defended my second qualifying paper "(Hyper)raising, thematic relations, and events."

Handout of a subpart of this project that argues English in fact does have hyperraising
Handout of a different subpart, arguing that English infinitival raising and Cantonese & Vietnamese hyperraising share an "indirect evidence" restriction (à la Ming and Yip 2024), and the underlying source of this restriction is the theta-criterion (or something like it)
Manuscript coming very soon!

E-mail: daniel.greeson@stonybrook.edu

Office: N-214 Social and Behavioral Sciences (in the middle of the north wing of the second floor)

Current roles: I am the Department of Linguistics union mobilizer with the Stony Brook GSEU. I am also currently a teaching assistant for LIN 311: Introduction to Syntax. If you have any questions about the class, just send me an email.

Are you a SUNY grad student? Join your union! https://www.cwa1104gseu.com/become-gseu-member

Here's me recording my pronunciation of talent and other words that seem to have long-distance nazaliation for some Michiganders, as part of joint work led by Betsy Sneller. [Picture credit to Silvina Bongiovanni, also many thanks to her for letting me and Betsy use her nasometer!]