Caroline Heycock is a Scottish syntactician and
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...
of
linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
at the
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
.
Heycock received her PhD from the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
in 1991, with a dissertation entitled ''Layers of predication: The non-lexical syntax of clauses''.
Heycock is known for her work in theoretical syntax, with particular reference to English, Faroese language, Faroese and the other Germanic languages, and to Japanese language, Japanese. Topics on which she has conducted notable research include reconstruction phenomena, equatives and other copular constructions, particularly pseudoclefts, the syntax and semantics of (especially) nominal conjunction, and syntactic attrition in the native language of advanced learners of a second language. In 2019 she was a co-author of a work examining the possible position of contractions in Scots English, focusing on the use of a "locative discovery expressions" in which speakers can utter both "there it's there" and "there its".
She has been an editor-in-chief of the ''Journal of Linguistics'', published by Cambridge University Press for the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Linguistic Association of Great Britain and is currently on its editorial board. She is a member of the Scots Syntax Atlas Project Team.
Recognition
In July 2019 Heycock was elected Fellow of the British Academy. She was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022.
Selected publications
* Caroline Heycock. 1995. "Asymmetries in reconstruction," ''Linguistic inquiry.'' 547–570.
* Caroline Heycock, Anthony Kroch. 1999. "Pseudocleft connectedness: Implications for the LF interface level,"
* ''Linguistic inquiry,'' 30(3), 365–397.
* Ianthi Tsimpli, Antonella Sorace, Caroline Heycock, Francesca Filiaci. 2004. "First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English,"
* ''International Journal of Bilingualism'' 8 (3), 257–277.
* Caroline Heycock. 2006. "Embedded root phenomena," 2006.''The Blackwell companion to syntax,''
* Gary Thoms, David Adger, Caroline Heycock, Jennifer Smith. 2019. "Syntactic variation and auxiliary contraction: The surprising case of Scots," ''Language.'' 95 (3), 421–455.
References
External links
YouTube: Generative Syntax with Prof Caroline Heycock
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heycock, Caroline
Academics of the University of Edinburgh
Syntacticians
Linguists
Women linguists
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
University of Pennsylvania alumni
Fellows of the British Academy
Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh