Benjamin Bruening

Biography

Benjamin Bruening, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 2001 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The focus of his linguistic research is syntax and its interactions with morphology and semantics. Bruening co-organized the Syntax-Semantics Lab (SySeL) with Satoshi Tomioka, Ph.D., professor of linguistics and cognitive science.

More specific interests include the following:

• The syntax and morphology of the Algonquian languages Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Mi'kmaq, spoken in Maine and the Maritime Provinces of Canada; see my Ph.D. dissertation, Syntax at the Edge: Cross-Clausal Phenomena and the Syntax of Passamaquoddy (MIT, 2001), available from MIT Working Papers in Linguistics;
• Ditransitive constructions in various languages;
• Auxiliaries and inversion in English;
• The nature of reflexivity;
• The syntax and semantics of reciprocals;
• Wh-scope marking and wh-copying in the languages of the world;
• The connection between morphology and phonology in Semitic languages;
• Neurolinguistics and sentence processing;
• Purely syntactic approaches to word formation.