The syntax and semantics working group, affectionately known as ‘SynSem’, is home to faculty and students at the UT Department of Linguistics, as well as visitors and guests, with a common interest in morphosyntactic form and all aspects of meaning across languages. This includes participants whose main research is in syntax and semantics and those from other areas who are curious about syntax and semantics or whose research intersects with it. Our remit is broad, covering everything from morphology through lexical semantics and the syntax-semantic interface all the way to social meaning and pragmatics, with methodologies that include consultant-based work, experimental approaches, archival & corpus methods, computational simulation and machine learning, and formal modeling.  

SynSem meets weekly for presentations and updates, with lively discussions of ongoing research as well as new developments in the field. Graduate students are welcome in SynSem from their first semester until they complete their degrees, and beyond.