Here is a snapshot of research currently being done in nanosyntax
- Michal Starke's work on the architecture underpinning nanosyntax, on deriving allomorphy patterns in English irregular verbs from competition in spelling out syntactic trees, on phrasal templatic effects in Bantu partial reduplication, seen as lexically stored syntactic trees associated with a phonological template
Gillian Ramchand's work on deriving syntactic verb classes from the idea that their various syntactic and semantic behaviours derive from the fact that they correspond to various sizes of syntactic structure, as well as ongoing joint work with Michal Starke to rework the architecture of grammar in order to capture the growing integration of formal semantics and fine-grained syntax
Tarald Taraldsen's work on noun classes in Bantu, in which he derives the syncretism patterns among the various instances of class markers from their structural subset/superset relationships -- a pioneering approach to a traditionally mysterious topic, which also provides an insight into why some languages have many noun classes while others have few or none -- again this follows from the various structural sizes of noun class affixes and nouns themselves across languages
Pavel Caha's work on case theory: cases such as Nominative, Accusatives, etc are shown to be structural subsets of each other. Not only does each case span several syntactic terminals, but they stand in an implicational relationship to each other. Building on this, Caha shows that nanosyntax yields a natural explanation for syncretism patterns, and that his new approach to case theory offers an explanation for syncretism patterns in morphological case systems. It also offers a new avenue to understand the semantic interpretation of case -- two of the hard nuts in case theory. In other nanosyntactic work, Caha has also discovered and explained phonological templatic effects on Czech infinitival verbs and shown how they can be mapped onto a fine-grained syntax (joint work with Tobias Scheer).
Peter Svenonius' research on adpositional systems and how they relate to the semantics of space. Svenonius shows on the one hand that cross-linguistic patterns of adpositions and verbs can be understood once their syntax and semantics is carefully studied and they are seen to realize different spans of syntactic terminals. In related work, Svenonius explores the important question of which ingredients of the semantics of space are grammaticalised as tiny syntactic terminals and which belong to the general conceptual domain.
Marina Pantcheva's work on syncretisms and underlying structures of goal/source/place prepositions, Minjeong Son's work on verbs and prepositions in Korena, Antonio Fabregas' work on the noun phrases in Spanish.
Two recent PhD dissertations, by Peter Muriungi and Bjorn Lundqvist, discuss the syntax of Bantu verbs and eventive noun phrases respectively, on the premise that these items realise phrasal elements and that their varying sizes and syntax explains their syntactic behaviour
We have much more work waiting to be done about various new avenues opened by nanosyntax, and we are very excited to be exploring this new theoretical world, both in discovering new domains of study and in making better sense of results of recent syntactic work.