Marcin Morzycki

Research interests

Broadly, my research interests are semantics, syntax, and their interface.

Many of the issues I’ve worked on over the years are related in one way or another to modification—adjectives, adverbials, manners, degree expressions, measure phrases, events, among others—and I wrote a book on the topic, but it’s not actually altogether clear that this label designates a single natural class of empirical phenomena, so are some more specific overlapping themes:

Measurement, mathematical language, and numerals. With Ryan Bochnak, I currently have a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to explore this topic, especially in understudied languages and crosslinguistically (and we very much welcome applications from potential grad students interested in this!). I’ve worked with Adam Gobeski on ranges (e.g. from six to twelve monkeys) in this paper and this older one, and on and composite measure phrases (e.g. one in four). I’ve also worked on single. In much older work I examined crosscategorial measure phrases.
Modifier questions. With various collaborators, I have explored how modifier questions are composed in Ktunaxa, on propositional readings of how in English, and implicitly degree-oriented questions in English and Ktunaxa.
Natural language ontology. With collaborators I have proposed treating degrees as Carlsonian kinds of states, and in older work introducing manners as a type in the model by treating them as event kinds. I’ve also worked on the ontology of scales, on null individuals, and on the distinction between degree concepts and abstract mass qualities.
Nominal gradability, degree modification, and gradability across categories. I’ve examined how size adjectives contribute to nominal gradability (big idiot), and how other degree expressions do too. More recently I’ve worked on degree nominalizations. An older paper considers extreme degree modifiers like flat-out and another, ad-adjectival adverbs like remarkably. I’ve also worked on metalinguistic comparatives, which have a crosscategorial distribution. This ancient paper draws attention to crosscategorial uses of particles like almost.
Manner modification. More or less recently I’ve worked on why manner descriptions tend to be unexpectedly definite and how manner and other modifier questions are formed in Ktunaxa. With collaborators, I’ve proposed that ‘manners’ can be understood as kinds of events. This has also come up in this paper focused on degrees, but the idea dates originally from this nearly quarter-century old proceedings paper. I’ve also worked on why how often gets non-manner readings.
Adjectival lexical semantics and nonlocal readings of adjectives. This paper attempts a general theory of nonlocal readings, and you can also look at this earlier attempt or an early assessment of the data in my book. They also come up with respect to single and bare singulars in English. Years ago I worked on extreme adjectives (also, in an earlier incarnation, here). I’ve also worked on adjectives like whole.