Mr Gary C Wood

Room 2.22, Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA

Internal extension: 20223
Phone number: +44 (0)114 222 0223
Fax: +44 (0)114 222 8481

Overview

I teach on the BA(Hons) English Language with Linguistics course, and am Admissions Tutor for that course and dual honours degrees with linguistics. I am currently completing my PhD thesis within the School and am also a member of the organising committee for the UK Linguistics Olympiad, after I was involved in hosting Round 2 of the 2010 competition at the University of Sheffield.

Research

I am primarily interested in first language acquisition, especially the acquisition of syntax and semantics, with a particular focus on more advanced constructions acquired in later stages of language development.

My PhD thesis (which I´m currently writing up) investigates the acquisition by children of `sluicing´, an ellipsis phenomenon in which embedded questions are omitted (e.g. Somebody said something, but I don´t know who [said something].).

This phenomenon is acquired relatively late, appearing in the primary school years, and my project uses a specifically-designed new research methodology, to elicit fine-grained judgments of sluiced sentences from children, to chart the development of the construction.

The work attempts to use these empirical data to arbitrate between the theoretical accounts of the sluicing in the literature, with findings that are both theoretically and empirically interesting, having implications for linguistic theory as well as language acquisition.

Teaching

I teach on the BA(Hons) English Language with Linguistics course, and in the 2011-12 academic session am convening Syntax (ELL221) as well as leading the core introductory first year module Structure of English (ELL113).

In previous years, I have also taught on modules in language acquisition, psychology of language and varieties of English at undergraduate level, and convened a course in Linguistic Theory & Language Acquisition at on the MA Language Acquisition programme.

Selected Publications

Published

Wood, G. (2009) The Identity of Silence: Acquiring the identity condition on sluicing. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 138-150.
Duffield, N., Matsuo, A., Wood, G. & Churchill, R. (2007) How different can (it) be for English and Japanese Children? In Otsu, Y. (Eds.) The Eighth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. 77-94. Tokyo, Hitsuji Publishing Company.
Duffield, N., Matsuo, A. & Wood, G. (2005) Something Different (in English and Japanese). In Bamman, D., Magnitskaia, T. & Zaller, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Boston Conference on Language Development. 154-165. Somerville MA, Cascadilla Press.

Accepted

Matsuo, A., Sotaro, K. Sinya, Y., Wood, G., & Naigles, L.R. (accepted) Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings.