Prof. Szabolcsi is now at New York University.  For her current Web page, go to:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/people/faculty/szabolcs.htm

--Webmaster

Prof. Anna Szabolcsi UCLA Linguistics Dept. 3125 Campbell Hall Los Angeles CA 90095-1543 annasz@humnet.ucla.edu

Research Interests

I have recently wrapped up research done within the frames of an NSF project called "Weak Islands and Scope." Traditionally, all rules that assign scope to quantifiers and wh operators are assumed to apply uniformly to all syntactically eligible expressions. This work centered around the observation that different quantifiers/wh-operators have quite different scope taking abilities. In some cases the explanation I proposed is purely semantic, in many others it pertains to the syntax/semantics interface.

The results of my work, together with those of colleagues and students who have been working on related issues in a related spirit (in alphabetical order, F. Beghelli, D. Ben-Shalom, J. Doetjes, D. Farkas, J. Gutierrez-Rexach, M. Honcoop, E. Stabler, T. Stowell, and F. Zwarts) are published in "Ways of Scope Taking".  (Kluwer, 1997).

I am currently working on Hungarian syntax (verb and particle movement, in collaboration with Hilda Koopman) and on some linguistic applications of Dynamic Semantics for ex., Reconstruction, anaphora, and pronouns as identity maps (which is available online in PDF format and Postscript format) and Focus, Negation, and Verb Movement in Hungarian (available online in PDF format and Postscript format).

Selected Publications

Combinatory Grammar and Projection from the Lexicon. In Sag & Szabolcsi, eds., Lexical Matters. CSLI, Stanford, 1992.

The Noun Phrase. In Kiefer & Kiss, eds., The Syntactic Structure of Hungarian. Syntax and Semantics 27. Academic Press, 1994.

Papers in Ways of Scope Taking (Kluwer, 1997):
         Variation, Distributivity, and the Illusion of Branching (with Beghelli and
                       Ben-Shalom)
          Strategies for Scope Taking
          Weak Islands and an Algebraic Semantics for Scope Taking (with Zwarts,
                       reprinted from Natural Language Semantics, 1993)
           Quantifiers in Pair-list Readings

Teaching

• Undergraduate
  • Semantics (Ling. 125)
  • Introduction to Language(Ling. 1)/Linguistics(Ling. 20)
• Graduate:
  • Survey of Formal Semantics (Ling. 207)
  • Seminar on my current work and/or related literature

Previous Appointments

• 1976--present (on leave since 1990): Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
• 1983: Visiting Fellow in the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• 1984/85: A.P.Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center of Cognitive Science, M.I.T.
• 1988: Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh University
• 1993: Faculty at the LSA Linguistic Institute, Columbus, Oh.
• 1994: Visiting Professor, Theoretical Linguistics Programme of the Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
• 1997: Visitor, Semantics Group, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Last Updated: June 1, 1997