Dr Danfeng Wu

Subject: Linguistics & Philology

Academic position: Fellow by Examination

Contact

Background

I received my PhD in linguistics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently, and prior to that a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Columbia University. I worked in the industry for three years between BA and PhD.

Research Interests

I am a linguist with research interests in structure, meaning (syntax-semantics) and intonation (prosody). The linguistic system maps a hierarchical syntactic representation onto a linear prosodic structure. I investigate the degree to which hierarchical syntactic structure and linear prosodic structure are similar, what sorts of deviations are permitted, and what the prosodic structure can tell us about the properties of the syntactic structure. My research in the syntax-prosody mapping is based on my theoretical work in syntax and its interactions with semantics, another research interest of mine. My syntactic-semantic research is grounded in the empirical phenomena of focus and ellipsis in coordination: I study the syntactic distribution of focus-sensitive operators, how the meaning of coordination may be affected by the interaction of focus and ellipsis, and how coordinators reflect the discourse structure.

Selected Publications

2022 Danfeng Wu. Island violations in clausal ellipsis. Glossa.

2022 Danfeng Wu. Syntax of either in eitheror… sentences. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 40:933–977.

2022 Danfeng Wu. Why *if or not but ✓whether or not. Linguistic Inquiry 53(2):412–425.

2019 Miyagawa, Shigeru, Danfeng Wu and Masatoshi Koizumi. Inducing and blocking labeling. Glossa 4(1): 141. 1–26.