Rui P. Chaves

Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics of the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Office: 604 Baldy
Address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo NY 14260-1030
Phone: (716) 645-0133
Email:
GitHub: https://github.com/RuiPChaves
OSF: https://osf.io/uwtvp/

Research

My work studies how sentences are put together (syntax) and how their structure connects to meaning (semantics). I am especially interested in sentence patterns where words are missing (ellipsis) or appear far from where they belong (extraction). In my research, I use large collections of real language data, computer models (large-scale grammars and neural networks), and controlled experiments that study how people understand how grammar and human cognition work together. My theoretical work is based on frameworks that focus on the surface form of sentences, such as HPSG/SBCG, and I have built medium-sized computer models of these grammars for research.

PhD Supervision

Park, SangHee (2019) Gapping: A Constraint-Based Syntax-Semantics Interface, University at Buffalo. [co-supervised by J. P. Koenig]
Jin, Dawei (2016) The Semantic-Pragmatics Interface and Island Constraints in Chinese, University at Buffalo.
Wetta, Andrew C. (2014) Construction-based Approaches to Flexible Word Order, University at Buffalo. [addendum]

I'm also currently serving as the Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies for the Computational Linguistics programs.

Representative research

Chaves, Rui P., Paul Kay, and Laura Michaelis (2025) Unrealized Arguments and the Grammar of Context, Elements in Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Chaves, Rui P. and Elaine J. Francis (2024) "Long-term effects of repeated exposure to Subject Island constructions: evidence for syntactic adaptation", Glossa Psycholinguistics, 3(1): 17, pp. 1–45.
Chaves, Rui P. and Michael T. Putnam (2022) "Islands, expressiveness, and the theory/formalism confusion", Comment on Theoretical Linguistics, 48(3-4): 219-231.
Chaves, Rui P. and Avery Malone (2022) "Reward-modulated syntactic adaptation in self-paced reading", Poster presented at The 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, UC Santa Cruz.
Chaves, Rui P. and Stephanie Richter (2021) "Look at that! BERT can be easily distracted from paying attention to morphosyntax", in 4th Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), Vol. 4, Article 4, pp.11.
Richter, Stephanie and Rui P. Chaves (2020) "Investigating the Role of Verb Frequency in Factive and Manner-of-speaking Islands", in Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Toronto. pp. 1771–1777.
Sag, Ivan A., Rui P. Chaves, Anne Abeillé, Bruno Estigarribia, Dan Flickinger, Paul Kay, Laura Michaelis, Stefan Müller, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Frank Van Eynde, Thomas Wasow (2020), "Lessons from the English auxiliary system" Journal of Linguistics, 56(1): 87–155.
Chaves, R. P. and Adriana King (2019) "A usage-based account of subextraction effects", Cognitive Linguistics, 30(4) 719–750
Chaves, Rui P. (2019) "Construction Grammar", in Current approaches to syntax – a comparative handbook, (eds.) András Kertész, Edith Moravcsik, and Csilla Rákosi, Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics series, Gruyter Mouton, 49–96.

See the publications page for a more complete listing.

Book out on Oxford University Press

Chaves, Rui P. and Michael T. Putnam. (2021) Unbounded Dependency Constructions: theoretical and experimental perspectives, Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology 10, Oxford University Press.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of unbounded dependency constructions and their constraints. It provides a detailed empirical and theoretical comparison of movement-based and non-movement-based accounts, and reports new data and experimental findings that challenge long-standing theoretical assumptions. This work argues for an exemplar-based construction-based conception of extraction and of grammatical theory that is consistent with the behavioural facts of incremental sentence processing, and it showcases how linguistic phenomena can be shaped by the interplay of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, phonologic, and cognitive factors.

A review of the book in the Journal of Linguistics can be found here.
There is also an errata.