Karen Zagona

Prof. Zagona’s research is primarily concerned with the syntactic underpinnings of tense, aspect and mood, including study of the functional categories and syntactic features that contribute to temporal reference. Some of the issues of current interest in her work include such questions as: whether all languages have Tense Phrase in the usually understood sense; whether temporal ordering is attributable to Tense Phrase or to higher functional categories where mood is encoded; and differences between nominals and clauses with respect to the distribution of temporal functional categories. The broad goal of this work is to further the field's understanding of what is universal in the grammar of tense/aspect/modality.