Please click here for my LinkedIn profile and here for a list of papers I have written (or collaborated on) and other papers in which they have been cited.

Research Interests

• Arabic Language and Linguistics:
  Syntax, Morphosyntax, and Pragmatics of Levantine Arabic dialects, Southern Levantine (Palestinian, Jordanian) in particular; Comparative grammar of Arabic dialects; Various aspects of Standard Arabic grammar.

• Arabic Language Pedagogy:
  Teaching of Arabic as a foreign language, issues related to diglossia in the classroom, development of computer-based teaching and learning aids.

• Linguistic Phenomena:
  Negation and negative concord; topic-comment structures; pronominal resumption; auxiliation and restructuring/clause-union; Interpretation of indefinites; focus semantics.

• Formalisms:
  Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), Categorial Type Logic (CTL), Minimalism/GB, Lexical Functional Grammar; Dynamic Semantics.

• Computational Linguistics:
  CCG Parsing, Arabic NLP (parsing, sentiment analysis).

• Historical Linguistics:
  Indo-European historical linguistics, particularly Germanic and Celtic; "Tolkienian" linguistics; Syntactic and morphological change.

Dissertation

Some Papers and Talk Handouts

• Hoyt (2014). "Prosodic Constituency and Locality in Levantine Arabic Long-Distance Negative Concord". To appear in Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXI, Edited by Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud. John Benjamin's (Philadelphia).
• Hoyt & Teodorescu (2012). "How Many Kinds of Sluicing and Why? Single and Multiple Sluicing in Romanian, English, and Japanese." to appear in Sluicing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. edited by Jason Merchant and Andrew Simpson. Oxford University Press. 83-103. Largely descriptive paper about sluicing sentences.

• Lemmas from the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (EALL). "Polarity," "Predicate," "Nominal Clause," "Noun Phrase," "Specificity," "Verb Phrase," "Verbal Clause." These are surveys of theoretical approaches that contemporary theoretical linguistics have taken to the phenomena in question. The most recent additions are "Verb Phrase" and "Verbal Clause."

• Hoyt and Baldridge (2008)"A Logical Basis for the D Combinator and Normal Form in CCG" to be presented at ACL '08. A highly technical paper, but with some linguistic argumentation. We show that the existing CCG rule set does not adaquately account for a number of common linguistic generalizations, and propose incorporating Curry and Fey's D-combinator into the CCG-rule set. We show that rules based on D can be incorporated seamlessly into different definitions of CCG, and that doing so allows Eisner's well-known normal form parsing constraints to be incorporated into CCG as a theoretical construct.

• Hoyt (2007). "An Arabic Wackernagel Clitic? The Morphosyntax of Negation in Palestinian Arabic." in Proceedings of the 20th Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. John Benjamins (Philadelphia). A largely descriptive paper about the distribution of the `sh' negation particle in two dialects of Arabic. A little bit of theory at the end. Mostly corpus data. 7/07: Here's an updated version with more web data."

• Hoyt (2006). "Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic: A Comparison of TAG and CCG Analyses." in proceedings of TAG+8, July 14-15 (Sydney, Australia). A theoretical/formal linguistics paper comparing how the Tree Adjoining Grammar and Combinatory Categorial Grammar formalisms fare when confronted with some interesting generalizations about negative sentences in Palestinian Arabic. Elicited, corpus, and internet data.

• Hoyt (2006). "Long-Distance Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic." Hoyt (2006). "Long-Distance Negative Concord and Restructuring in Palestinian Arabic." paper presented at the Workshop on Concord Phenomena and the Syntax-Semantics Interface, August 7-11 (Málaga, Spain). A theoretical paper illustrating an attempt at a Minimalist analysis of the same generalizations discussed in the TAG/CCG paper. Elicited, corpus, and internet data.

• Hoyt (2005). "Sentential Negation Marking in Palestinian and Moroccan Arabic: A Study in Comparative Morphosyntax." MS, UT-Austin. A purely descriptive paper written for a seminar on Arabic dialectology. Elicited, corpus, and internet data.

• Hoyt (2005). "Negative Concord in Two Dialects of Arabic." MS, UT-Austin. Mostly theoretical but some (I think) useful description of negative concord in Palestinian and Moroccan Arabic. Mostly corpus data, some elicited and some internet.

• Hoyt (2004). "Subject-Verb Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic: An LFG Implementation in the Xerox Language Engineering Environment." MS, UT-Austin. Mostly a theoretical paper, dignified by implementation in a NLP engineering environment. Draws heavily of Fassi-Fehri's (1988) LFG analysis of agreement in Modern Standard, Egyptian and Moroccan Arabic. XLE grammar file and test bed can be had here and here.

• Hoyt (2002). "Impersonal Agreement as a Specificity Effect in Rural Palestinian Arabic." Appeared in Proceedings of the 13-14th Symposiums on Arabic Linguistics. John Benjamins (Philadelphia). Theoretical paper in an obsolete framework, but the description is useful. NOTE: This version corrects several errors in the morpheme glosses in the published version.

• Hoyt (2000). "Reduced Agreement as a Specificity Effect in Rural Palestinian Arabic Existential Constructions." (2.5mb) (2-up version) MA Thesis, Cornell (2000). Theoretical study of existential sentences in Palestinian Arabic. The theory part is obsolete and uninteresting, but there's a lot of nice data (both elicited and corpus) about the syntax and pragmatics of the constructions in question. NOTE: Updated 1/07 to include bibliography.