
Nadeem Siddiqi
Vice-Provost of Graduate Studies (Office of Graduate Studies); Professor (Linguistics)
Degrees: | BA in English (UC Davis), MFA in Creative Writing (Mills College), MA & PhD in Linguistics (Arizona) |
Phone: | 613-520-2600 x 2518 (Graduate Studies), x 1249 (Morphology Lab) |
Email: | nadeem.siddiqi@carleton.ca |
Office: | 512 Tory Building (Graduate Studies), 249 Paterson Hall (Morphology Lab) |
Research:
Dan Siddiqi’s research focuses on formal linguistic theory and philosophy of science with specializations in morphology, grammatical architecture, and metatheory. Dan has secondary focuses on syntax, morphophonemics, lexical processing and parsing, lexical semantics, and English history and variation. Today, his research primarily revolves around the development of the Lexical Realizational Functional Grammar model of grammar, a merging of Distributed Morphology and Lexical Functional Grammer created by Ash Asudeh (Rochester) and Dan here at Carleton University. Historically, Dan’s research has focused on the stem allomorphy, syncretism, suppletion, and the status of Roots in Distributed Morphology with secondary focuses on English morphological phenomena.
Dan also runs the Morphology Lab in SLaLS, which has housed two post-doctoral fellows (Paul Melchin and Gavin Bembridge) and four PhD Research Assistants (Isabelle Boyer, Louise Koren, Lara Russo, Jennice Hinds). The Morphology Lab houses two distinct grant-funded research programs.
The LRFG Virtual Lab is a international multi-university research endeavor tackling various morphological phenomena with the new model. The lab is co-operated by Dan and Ash with Neil Myler (Boston), Oleg Belyaev (Moscow State), Bronwyn Bjorkman (Queen’s), Frances Dowle (Oxford), and Lisa Sullivan (Oklahoma State) as key contributors.
The Feature Competition Lab studies and documents syncretism patterns across languages with the ultimate aim of building an open access database and developing a model of accounts of morphological upstaging, a phenomenon whereby the exponence of one feature or class of features is preferred over the exponence of another. This lab is led by professors from four different Canadian universities: Bronwyn Bjorkman, Elizabeth Cowper (Toronto), and Daniel Currie Hall (St. Mary’s).
The majority of Dan’s recent talks and publications can be found at the LRFG website: LRFG.online (https://lrfg.online/)
Teaching:
Dan teaches only one class per year (in the Winter term): A graduate seminar in Morphology (LING 5005). Recent topics have included Roots (2023), Comparative Morphological Theory (2021), and Distributed Morphology (2025).
Dan has supervisory appointments in the Department of Cognitive Science and the Department of English in addition to SLaLS. Dan primarily supervises students in morphological theory, morphological phenomena, and functional words (such as pronouns and particles). Dan has limited supervisory capacity remaining and is only taking on one additional graduate student and one additional undergraduate student per year, so please reach out to Dan early if you are interested.