Welcome! স্বাগতম! Soo dhowow!

Hi there. My name's Dustin Chacón, and I am a first year Linguistics Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland: College Park. My advisors are Colin Phillips and Howard Lasnik.

In my free time I play with my cat, Ernie, work with the Somali American Community Association, and can be spotted at your nearest kitchy karaoke bar. I also am a bit of a language nut.

Interests

I'm interested in the problem of crosslinguistic variation and its implications for the syntax/semantics and syntax/morphology interfaces within the framework of generative linguistics. Within this realm, I have done some work or am currently doing work on the form and interpretation of DPs -- especially with reference to classifiers and the representation of number and the count/mass distinction -- and the representation of argument structure and event structure. I take a (relatively) constructionist approach to these problems, with an eye towards keeping a simple and transparent mapping between syntax and the interfaces and maintaining a learnable lexicon. The specific linguistic areas I consider myself a (hopefully) blooming expert are Indo-Aryan languages and Cushitic languages, though those who know me might tell you that I have a bit of an infatuation with Basque, signed languages, Eskimo-Aleut languages, and the Southeast Asian Sprachbund, all of which may periodically pop up now and again in my work.

Out of the armchair, I am interested in what different flavors of grammatical form might tell us about the structuring of the parser and its relationship to grammatical knowledge. I have also done some work under Serguei Pakhomov on how Alzheimer's Disease affects syntactic complexity and pragmatic knowledge and objective and computationally-implemented ways of characterizing these effects.

Downloadables

My CV.

Handout for A Superlative Puzzle for Bošković's NP/DP Parameter, presented with Alexis Wellwood at the CNRS 2012 Workshop on Languages with and without Articles.

Head Movement in the Bangla DP.

Submitted copy of Head Movement Before and After Spellout, submitted to the Journal of Syntax.

Presentation with Nancy Stenson's Field Methods class for 2010 Minnesota Student Workshop on Linguistics (MNSWOL): ``Marka Jecelne!''

Labs

Indexicals

With Kate Harrigan, Naho Orita, Ruth Kramer and I have been looking at the parameters of variation and the acquisition of indexical shifting and logophoricity. We are hoping to understand what children have to learn, the relationship to the theory of mind and other cognitive abilities, and what a possible array of properties a language may have are. Specifically, we are looking at Amharic, Ewe, and -- potentially in the near future -- Zazaki. We have a wiki for the project. Mail me for access.