Rui Chaves

Research Interests:

Research focuses on the interaction between syntactic phenomena, semantics, pragmatics, and general cognition, in order to arrive at more comprehensive and psychologically plausible models of linguistic behavior. Main topics of interest include long-distance dependencies, extraposition, island phenomena, coordination, and ellipsis. Specializes on formally explicit construction-based theories of grammar, experimental syntax, and grammar implementation.

Recent Publications

Chaves, Rui P. and Michael T. Putnam. (2020) Unbounded Dependency Constructions: theoretical and experimental perspectives, Oxford University Press.

Chaves, Rui P. (2020) “What Don’t RNN Language Models Learn About Filler-Gap Dependencies?”, 3rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), Vol. 3, Article 4:20–30.

Sag, Ivan A., Rui P. Chaves, Anne Abeillé, Bruno Estigarribia, Dan Flickinger, Paul Kay, Laura Michaelis, Stefan Müller, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Frank Van Eynde, Thomas Wasow (2020), “Lessons from the English auxiliary system” Journal of Linguistics, 56(1): 87–155.

Chaves, R. P. and Adriana King (2019) “A usage-based account of subextraction effects”, Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, 30(4) 719–750

Chaves, Rui P. (2019) “Construction Grammar” In Current approaches to syntax – a comparative handbook, (eds.) András Kertész, Edith Moravcsik, and Csilla Rákosi, Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics series at de Gruyter Mouton, 49–96.

Chaves, R. P. and Jeruen E. Dery (2019) “Frequency Effects in Subject Islands” Journal of Linguistics, 55(3), 475–521