Liam Garside

PhD Student in Linguistics
Newcastle University, UK

l.garside@newcastle.ac.uk

Research interests: syntax and semantics, sociolinguistics, Romance linguistics.

About

In September 2024, I began my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Michelle Sheehan, Dr. Daniel Duncan, Dr. Gabriel Martínez Vera (Newcastle University), and Prof. Rob Truswell (University of Edinburgh). My doctoral research builds on my MA dissertation, where I investigated the distinctive behavior of the Spanish causative verb hacer ("to make") in comparison with its Romance cognates. Adopting a quantitative approach, I seek to integrate sociolinguistic findings into the formal syntactic analysis of causative constructions.

My PhD is part of a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on causative and perception verbs in Romance languages. I work closely with a research team led by PI Prof. Michelle Sheehan, alongside Co-Is Prof. Rob Truswell, Prof. Adam Ledgeway, and Dr. Sonia Cyrino, and research associates Dr. Giulia Mazzola and Dr. Clémentine Raffy. In addition to my doctoral research, I contribute to the project by coordinating data collection and analysis for Spanish and Catalan.

Outside my work on causation, I have also been a Research Assistant on a project examining argument structure in Portuguese, focusing on heritage speakers in the UK (with Prof. Michelle Sheehan and Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou). Additionally, I collaborated with Dr. Daniel Duncan on a sociolinguistic study of pronominal variation in Tyneside English. I co-presented findings from these two studies at the 2024 annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB).


Academic background

MA Linguistics (2023-24; Newcastle University)

BA Modern Languages (2018-23; Newcastle University)

Languages

English (native), French and Spanish (advanced), Portuguese, Catalan and Italian (intermediate), Latin, Russian and Romanian (beginner).