User:Borgatya/David Adger

David Adger (born 23 September 1967) is a Scottish linguist, professor of Linguistics at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary University of London. He is a notable and respected scientist both in the United Kingdom and around the world in the field of Generative grammar. He is a devoted speaker and researcher od Scottish Gaelic.

Biography and career
Adger was born on 23 September 1967 in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. He took M.A. degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1989. The title of his master thesis was Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence.

He was awarded MSc degree by the University of Edinburgh in 1990. The title of his master thesis was Cognitive Science and Natural Language Processing. He completed his PhD degrees in 1994 at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh. The title of his doctoral thesis was Functional Heads and Interpretation.

In 1983 he became lecturer (assistant professor) in Libguistics at the University of York until 2002 and was appointed to reader (associate professor) in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London in 2002.

Adger is professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London from 2006.

He is currently President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain.

Achievements
He is primarily interested in the human capacity for syntax, the cognitive system that underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages.

His work involves developing generative theories of syntactic patterns, and investigating the consequences of these theories, both for particular languages and across genetically unrelated languages. He worked on Scottish Gaelic and other Celtic languages, but used data from many other languages to test theoretical proposals about the syntax of human language

He is fundamentally interested in how syntactic patterns relate to meanings.

His other main interest is how theories of syntax can be used to handle the variable use of different syntactic patterns by a single individual, and whether these theories have anything to contribute to explaining probabilistic patterns we see in the use of different syntactic forms.

Private life
He is openly gay. He was married to geographer professor Anson William Mackay in 2014.

Committee memberships

 * Linguistics Association of Great Britain, president – 2015

Books

 * Adger, D (2013) A Syntax of Substance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs). (189pp)
 * Adger, D. (2003) Core Syntax. Oxford University Press: Oxford. (425pp)

Papers

 * Adger, D (2017) “Restrictiveness Matters”. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. 24(1), 138-139
 * Adger, D (2011) “Clefted Situations: a note on expletives in Scottish Gaelic clefts” in A. Carnie (ed) Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 3-15.
 * Adger, D (2010) “Gaelic Morphology” in M. Watson and M. Macleod (eds) The Edinburgh Companion to the Gaelic Language, Edinburgh University Press, 283-303.
 * Adger, D (2010) “Gaelic Syntax” in M. Watson and M. Macleod (eds) The Edinburgh Companion to the Gaelic Language, Edinburgh University Press, 304-351.
 * Adger, D. and Ramchand, G. 2006. “Dialect variation in Gaelic relative clauses” in W. McLeod (ed) Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig. Dunedin Academic Press. 1-15.
 * Adger, D. 2005 “Fracturing the Adjective: evidence from Gaelic comparatives” in D. Harbour (ed) QMUL Occasional Papers in Linguistics. No 4. QMUL, London.
 * Adger, D. and Ramchand, G. 2005 “Merge vs Move: wh-dependencies revisited”. Linguistic Inquiry, 36.2, 161-193.
 * Adger, D. 1996 “Aspect, Agreement and Measure Phrases in Scottish Gaelic” in R. Borsley and I. Roberts (eds) The Syntax of the Celtic Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 200-222.