Veneeta Dayal is an American linguist. She is currently the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, and formerly of Rutgers University, where she served as Department chair from 2005-2008 and Acting Dean of Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences from 2008-2009. Dayal's research focuses on the interface of semantics and syntax, especially the areas of question forms and relative clauses, bare nominals and genericity, and quantifier words signalling free choice, such as "any." She has examined these forms in data from Hindi as well as English.
Since 2012 she has been an Associate Editor for the journal Linguistics and Philosophy. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Award for 2004- 2005: “South Asian Languages and Semantic Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Study” for research on classifiers in South Asian languages. In 2002-2003, she was awarded a National Science Foundation grant, “Quantification without Quantifiers,” to study the meaning conveyed by nouns without articles in English, Korean, Hebrew, and Hindi.
Selected publications
2013. “Bangla Plural Classifiers,” Language and Linguistics 15.1.
2013. “On the Existential Force of Bare Plurals Across Languages,” I. Caponigro and C.Cecchetto From Grammar to Meaning: The Spontaneous Logicality of Language, Cambridge University Press.
2013. “A Viability Constraint on Alternatives for Free Choice," in A. Falaus Alternatives in Semantics,Palgrave.2013d. “The syntax of scope and quantification”, den Dikken, The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax.
2012. “Bangla Classifiers: Mediating between Kinds and Objects," Rivista di Linguistica/Italian Journal of Linguistics 24.2.3
2011. “Bare Noun Phrases," Survey Paper, in Maienborn, von Heusinger and Portner, Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, 33.2 Mouton de Gruyter.
2011. “Hindi Pseudo Incorporation," Natural Language and Linguistic Theory29.1.
2010. Veneeta Dayal & Roger Schwarzschild. “Definite Inner Antecedents and Wh-Correlates in Sluices,” in Starverov, Peter, Daniel Altshuler, Aaron Braver, Carlos Fasola and Sarah Murray Rutgers Working Papers in Linguistics.
2009. “Variation in English Free Choice Items,” in Mohanty, Rajat and Mythili Menon Universals and Variation: Proceedings of GLOW in AsiaVII.
2009. “Semantic Variation and Pleonastic Determiners: The Case of the Plural Definite Generic," in Nguyen Chi Duy Khuong, Richa and Samar Sinha The Fifth Asian GLOW: Conference Proceedings, CIIL and FOSSSIL.
2007. Rajesh Bhatt and Veneeta Dayal. “Rightward Scrambling as Rightward Remnant Movement,” Linguistic Inquiry 38.2: 287–301.
2005. “Multiple-Wh-Questions,” in M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Volume 3, pp. 275–326, Blackwell Publishing.
2004. "Licensing by Modification," Ilha Do Desterro, special issue on Semantics: Lexicon, Grammarand Use, a Brazilian journal on language/linguistics, literature, and cultural studies in English.
1994. "Binding Facts in Hindi and the Scrambling Phenomenon," in M. Butt, T. King and G. Ramchand Theoretical Perspectives on WordOrder Issues in South Asian Languages, CSLI: Stanford.
