I’m happy that my book ‘Morphology–Semantics Mismatches and the Nature of Grammatical Features’ is at long last finished and released with De Gruyter. It’s a revised version of my 2015 dissertation and contains, in addition to the work that went into that, a better discussion of the wider context of some theoretical issues surrounding agreement and grammatical features. I also took the chance to organise the book the way I probably should have written the thesis the first time around, precisely the opposite way of what I did :)
Agreement, and semantic agreement more specifically, has been something that I worked on since the final year of my BA studies at UCL, over five years in Connecticut and five more years in Frankfurt. This book then is the culmination of that. Whilst I worked on other topics over the years - most happily the suppletion work I did with, among others, Beata Moskal - agreement was ever-present throughout my research career and it was nice to get the chance to pull it all together in this book. I hope that the poor souls who read it can learn something from it all.
And with that, it’s an appropriate publication to end with and I’m happy to be starting something new with Wärtsilä!
This was the last work I finished before I left academia, and started to follow a different path. There are various good aspects of following an academic career - I learned a lot, met some very smart people, supervised some really amazing students, and got to travel to some great places (trips to Berkeley, CA will live long in the memory). But, there are many less good ones too. I’m not the first, and definitely won’t be the last, young researcher to want more stability from what is for many a series of temporary contracts, and tire of trying to balance a family life with the workload that is expected of young researchers. These aren’t the only reasons for why I decided to do something else, and they are definitely not the only issues within the academic world. But they are well known structural problems for young researchers in academia; they are issues that drive many talented researchers away and ones that really need fixing. I don’t know what the answers to these are, but I hope that at some point they can be found.