Ivona Kucerova

Biography

Dr. Ivona Kučerová is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages. She also leads the Syntax Lab at McMaster University.   

Research Interest

Dr. Kučerová’s research focuses on phenomena that shed light on the division of labour between narrow syntax and its interfaces, especially the syntax-semantics interface. In particular, Dr. Kučerová is interested in the question of whether semantic information can modulate syntactic derivation, and if so, how exactly the information is passed on to the narrow syntax module. This overarching question comprises several subquestions: (i) is the mapping between syntax and semantics isomorphic, or is it subject to some form of computational economy? (ii) what units of syntactic structure may directly access information from the semantic module? (iii) how do we define these syntactic units? (iv) once we isolate the semantic input, do syntactic operations obey locality and other deterministic restrictions hypothesized to hold of syntactic computations?