I am a third year AHRC-funded PhD student in the department, supervised by Prof Nigel Fabb, and my main research interests is theoretical linguistics and its application to the language of literature.
In my thesis, I am investigating variation and deviation in the syntax of poetic language. The goals of this project are threefold: (1) to provide a wide-ranging descriptive account of the kind of syntactic deviation found in literary texts, paying particular attention to avantgarde literature in the 20th century (since previous accounts of literary language have tended to neglect the problems posed by the wider variation seen in such texts); (2) to develop a linguistic theory of poetic language, specifically a theory that explains why some kinds of linguistic variation and deviation are found in literary texts, while others are not; and (3) to place this theory in the wider context of theoretical discussion of the language of literature in linguistic theory, literary linguistics and literary theory more generally. This work is done in the framework of modern generative linguistics, i.e. Minimalism, and as such it is intended as a contribution to a growing body of research that may be termed a `modular literary linguistics' (as opposed to the non-generative, non-modular research done in the field of cognitive poetics and related work). More generally, I am interested in modernist literature and the avant garde, how radical literature and art can be understood with respect to theories of cognition, and in the cross-linguistic typology of literary form.
Parallel to this, I do research in formal syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. At present this research has two main strands: the theory of reconstruction, in which I argue for a syntactic theory of reconstruction that disposes with the A/A-bar distinction and is derived from general principles of (semantic) economy, and the theory of ellipsis, in which I try to dispense with the traditional technology of `licensing heads' and argue instead for a theory in which ellipsis (construed as PF deletion) is licensed by overt A-bar movement. I also have research interests in dialectal variation in English, do-support, identity conditions in ellipsis and the theory of scrambling.
I am a graduate training assistant within the department, and present I am co-ordinating a third/fourth year honours option class called 'Language and Media', which explores theories of communication (pragmatics and sociolinguistics) by looking at communication in various forms of mass media. Last year I taught the third/fourth year honours option class `Vladimir Nabokov' (standing in for Dr Elspeth Jajdelska), and previously I have worked as a GTA teaching Journalism, Romanticism & Modernism and Basic English.
I am a member of the department's Advanced Literary Linguistics Research Group (which has stemmed collaborative work with Stefano Versace at Università Degli Studi Di Milano), and of the Edinburgh-Strathclyde Minimalist Syntax reading group. I spent the Fall semester of 2008/09 as a visiting student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of Linguistics and Philosophy (funded by a Mac Robertson Traveling Scholarship). Before starting PhD, I completed an MRes here at Strathclyde entitled 'The syntax of experimental literature: a literary linguistic investigation' (2008), in which I focused upon the language of Samuel Beckett's prose.
I can be contacted at gary.thoms at gmail.com or gary.s.thoms at strath.ac.uk.
Papers/presentations:
Thoms, G., 2010b. `Syntactic reconstruction and Scope Economy.' Ms., University of Strathclyde. [very rough draft available; a version of this paper will be presented at GLOW 33, Wroclaw in April 2010.]
Thoms, G., 2010a. `Reducing Last Resort Insertion to Locality: English do-support.' Submitted for Proceedings of Minimalist Approaches to Syntactic Locality conference, Budapest, Hungary.
Thoms, G., 2009c. ```Verb-floating and VPE: towards a movement account of ellipsis licensing.' Paper presented at Brussels Conference in Generative Linguistics 4 (special theme: Ellipsis), CRISSP, Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Brussels. [handout available]
Thoms, G., 2009b. `British ``team'' DPs and theories of scope.' Paper presented at LangUE 09, University of Essex. [handout available for this short version; a longer, expanded version of this paper is in preparation.]
Thoms, G., 2009a. `Is avant garde literature constrained by language?' Seminar talk, University of Strathclyde. [handout available; this talk sketched some of the core ideas of my thesis, which is in preparation.]
Thoms, G., and S. Versace, 2009. `How does the mind do literary work?' Paper presented at Bidirectional Perspectives in the Cognitive Sciences, Marburg, Germany (under review for proceedings volume, 2010).
Thoms, G., 2008b. `When sentences are not sentences: evidence against poetic grammar.' Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Poetics And Linguistics Association (PALA), Sheffield University. Available in online proceedings: http://www.pala.ac.uk/resources/proceedings/2008/thoms2008.pdf
Thoms, G., 2008a. `The syntax of experimental literature: a literary linguistic investigation.' MRes dissertation, University of Strathclyde. [Available online from the Strathclyde Library catalogue]