Zhendong Liu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of Southern California (USC). I’m a generative syntactician working on syntax and its interfaces with morphophonology and semantics. In general, I aim to contribute to a better theory of human linguistic competence, which would explain a wider range of empirical phenomena and linguistic variations in terms of a smaller set of irreducible theoretical primitives and principles.

I believe that both bottom-up and top-down research are equally important: bottom-up meaning finding and explaining empirical puzzles, discovering possible causal links between seemingly unrelated facts; top-down meaning examining the parsimony, internal consistency and falsifying conditions of any set of hypothesized theoretical primitives that form a theory. My current empirical interests include (split) Ergativity, A and A’-movement, nominalizations, allomorphy conditioning and the meaning of event counting expressions. I have worked on Swahili, Uyghur and Mandarin Chinese, and now I’m working on Lhasa and Amdo Tibetan. My current theoretical interests include Phase, copy-resolution mechanisms, and case assignment mechanisms.