Norbert Corver, born in Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands, in 1963. Ph.D. from Tilburg University. Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Tilburg University.
Fellow (1 February 1997 – 30 June 1997)
During my NIAS year, my research focused on three areas: (1) the syntax of comparative constructions, and the phenomena of Comparative Deletion and Subdeletion in particular; (2) the second language acquisition of possessive structures by Turkish and Moroccan learners of Dutch; (3) the syntax of measure phrase expressions.
My research on comparative constructions was carried out for the SynCom project. SynCom will be a Hypertext CD-Rom which attempts to furnish the reader with complete and coherent descriptions of central results of syntactic research over the last thirty years. On behalf of this project, a case study was written on the phenomena of Comparative Deletion (e.g. They have more enemies than we have – ) and Subdeletion (e.g. They have more enemies than we have – friends). This study discusses various analyses that have been proposed within generative grammar and addresses such issues as the existence of a gap within the comparative clause, the nature of the gap, the nature of the relationship between the compared constituents within comparative constructions, the nature of the relationship between the comparative clause and the matrix clause.
The research on the second language acquisition of possessive structures aimed at the development of a theory of L2-acquisition according to which learners initially rely on the grammatical rule system of their first language and produce grammatical structures with L1-formal characteristics but with an L2-lexicalisation (the conservation hypothesis). In my research on measure nominals (as in a minute of headstart), I put forward the hypothesis that measure nominals are predicates which stand in a predication relationship to the nominal which represents the measuree. I argue that the word order ‘measure – measuree’ within nominal constructions is the result of a predicate inversion process which moves the measure-predicate from a position following the measuree to a position preceding it.