Travis Major

PhD Candidate - UCLA Linguistics



About me: I am a sixth year linguistics graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. I am a syntactician and a fieldworker who enjoys the empirical challenges associated with researching understudied languages and exploring how this novel empirical data informs universal grammar. Much of my research is focused on interactions between syntax-semantics and syntax-phonology/prosody. In order to reconcile my goals as a fieldworker with my goals as a theoretician, I spend considerable time refining techniques for data collection in my fieldwork to improve the quality of both facets of my research.


Recent News:

  • I have uploaded a revised version of my paper on the syntax of Indexical Shift in Uyghur .

  • I will be contributing a chapter on Uyghur Intonation to "Prosodic Typology III" (with Connor Mayer).

  • Richard Stockwell and I will be presenting research on the verb "say" and "Voice" at NELS 51, where we discuss differences between sentences like "John said to slow down", "The sign says to slow down on it", and "It says to slow down on the sign".

  • Harold Torrence and I have written a proceedings article based on our presentation at WCCFL38 @ UBC, focused on "say" complementation in Avatime.

  • I am in the process of finalizing a paper on the syntax of accusative case in Uyghur and Sakha (e-mail me for a copy).