My research is concerned with the mental representation of human language and in particular with the presentation of sentence structure, and the ways in which the component that generates this structure (syntax) interfaces with syntax-external systems, such as those concerned with information structure and quantifier scope.  I am especially interested in investigating the degree to which certain aspects of linguistic structure are determined by these external systems, both at the level of the word and at the level of the sentence.

In recent years I have explored the questions above in work on the following topics:

• Degree expressions
  
• Argument structure
  
• The syntactic encoding of grammatical dependencies
  
• Discourse-related word-order variation
  
• Psycholinguistic properties of A-dependencies
• Computational properties of human language

My work has been supported by two AHRC grants:

• 2011-2012 Dr Hans van de Koot (PI). AHRC Standard Grant Antecedent Priming in Sentences with Neutral Scrambling: Evidence from Dutch and German.
  
• 2006-2010 Prof. Ad Neeleman (PI), Dr. Hans van de Koot (CI). AHRC Standard Grant A Flexible Theory of Topic and Focus Movement.