My main academic interests concern syntactic structure, and the division of labour between syntax and semantics. I've focused on various topics, including the grammar of coordination, ellipsis phenomena, and syntactic discontinuities. My work is couched on precise construction- and constraint-based theories of grammar, and aims to be psychologically plausible. One of my main research goals is to explore finer-grained aspects of syntax via controlled experimental research, and to explain away certain stipulations as consequence of performance effects. Other areas of interest include parsing strategies, grammar implementation, dynamic/underspecfied semantics, and cognitively plausible computational models of human language processing.

• Chaves, R. P. (2009). "Construction-based Cumulation and Adjunct Extraction". In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Goettingen, Germany, pp.47–67. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
  
  
• Chaves, R. P. and J. E. Dery (2009). "Complexity, ellipsis and agreement puzzles in NP coordination". Poster in AMLAP 2009, 15th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. Barcelona, Spain.
  

• Chaves, Rui P. (2008). "Linearization-based word-part ellipsis". Linguistics and Philosophy, 31(3): 261–307.
  
  
• Ito, Chizuru and R. P. Chaves (2008). "Apparent Non-Constituent Coordination in Japanese". In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Keihanna, Japan, pp. 95–115. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

• Chaves, R. P. and Denis Paperno (2007). "On the Russian Hybrid Coordination Construction". In Stefan Müller (Edt.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, pp. 46&150;64. Stanford University.

• Chaves, R. P. (2007) "Dynamic Model Checking for Discourse Representation Structures with Pluralities". In J. Geertzen, E. Thijsse, H. Bunt, and A. Schiffrin (Eds.), 7th International Workshop on Computational Semantics, pp. 28–40. Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

• Chaves, R. P. (2006) "Coordination of Unlikes without Unlike Categories". In Stefan Müller (Edt.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Varna, Bulgaria. pp. 102–122, Stanford: CSLI Publications.