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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Kim Groothuis

Groothuis

College:

Christ's

Email:

kag45@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor:

Prof. Adam Ledgeway

About me:

I studied for a BA in Italian and a BA in Classics at Leiden University. In my third year, I spent a semester at the University of Bologna as an Erasmus student. My interests include (theoretical) syntax, diachronic linguistics and Italian dialectology. I therefore continued my studies in Leiden with a MA in Italian and a Research MA in Linguistics, for which I wrote a dissertation about the history of phrasal verbs in Italo-Romance varieties and a dissertation about inflected infinitives in Romance respectively.

My research:

Finiteness is a commonly used but not very well understood notion within linguistics. Several Romance varieties present phenomena that do not seem to fit into the traditional dichotomy between finite and non-finite constructions, such as the inflected and personal infinitives, which can have an expressed subject and agreement; or the Balkan-style finite  complementation patterns that are found in Romanian and some Extreme Southern Italian dialects, varieties which seem to have lost most uses of the infinitive.

Since the Romance languages are characterized by a high degree of microvariation and their history is relatively well documented in comparison to other languages families, comparative research on both diachronic and diatopic variation can inform us about the ways in which the degree of finiteness of constructions can change and whether this variation has its limits. My research focuses on the changes in finiteness and on these constructions that fail be classified as either finite or non-finite, using the generative approach to syntax as a theoretical framework.

Teaching:

ITA3: Texts and Contexts  (linguistics part)

IT2: Structures and Varieties of Italian

CS1: The Romance languages

FR1: Introduction to French literature, linguistics, film and thought (linguistics part)

Conference papers:

‘Controlled subjects in Sardinian inflected infinitives’, poster presented at the conference on Non-Finite Subjects, University of Nantes, France, April 2016

‘The inflected infinitive in Romance’, paper presented at the XLIV Romance Linguistics Seminar, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK, January 2016

‘The inflected infinitive in Romance’, paper presented at the XV International Conference of the Department of Linguistics, University of Bucharest, Romania, November 2015

‘Verb-particle combinations in English and Italian: A diachronic comparative perspective’, paper presented with Marion Elenbaas at the XXII ICHL, Federico II University of Naples, Italy, July 2015

 

Publications:

Groothuis, Kim A. 2017. Sardinian Inflected Infinitives and Control. In Elena Buja, Stanca Măda & Mona Arhire (eds.), (De/Re)contextualisation. Structure, use, and meaning., 71–94. Braşov: Editura Universităţii Transilvania din Braşov.

 

Groothuis, Kim A. 2018. Empirical and Analytical Problems of the Romance Inflected Infinitive: The State of the Art. In Gabriela Pană Dindelegan, Adina Dragomirescu & Alexandru Nicolae (eds.), Comparative and Diachronic Perspectives on Romance Syntax, 289–324. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

 

Groothuis, Kim A. Forthcoming. Postverbal Subject Positions in ‘Semi-finite’ Clauses in Southern Italo-Romance and Sardinian. Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2016. Selected papers from “Going Romance” Frankfurt 2016 (Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.