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On Thursday 19 June,  will defend his PhD dissertation ‘Processing Dependencies in Discourse: Memory Retrieval in Dependency Resolution Beyond the Syntactic Domain’. In this thesis, he shows that the relations between sentences are just as important for understanding language as the relationships within a single sentence.

Dependency relations beyond the sentence level

Language is full of dependency relations: words, phrases, sounds, and other linguistic elements are connected in various ways. They influence rely on each other and cannot be understood in isolation. Take the sentence ‘He is eating an apple.’ Here, ‘is eating’ depends on ‘he’, as the verb must agree with the subject. And ‘an apple’ depends on ‘is eating’, as it is the object of the verb.

Previous research has paid considerable attention to the role of syntactic rules — the grammar rules that determine how words combine to form sentences. However, Schmitz observed that dependency relations also exist beyond the syntactic domain. Relations between elements across different sentences, he argues, are equally crucial for producing and understanding language. This broader level of structure is known as discourse.

In his dissertation, Schmitz offers new insights into understanding dependency relations in discourse, bringing us closer to a full picture of how the brain processes language.