Michal Starke is the creator of nanosyntax - or maybe he just discovered it, depending on your beliefs about concepts. That happened in a fun seminar called “The day syntax ate morphology”, in the summer of 2002. Before that, he was known for the idea of a typology of deficient pronouns (clitic < weak < strong), in work together with Anna Cardinaletti; and for reformulating Relativised Minimality in his PhD dissertation, in a way that has since been widely adopted (Rizzi 2004, 2013 Belletti 2013, etc).

He also created (and still maintains) lingbuzz, the de facto standard archive of linguistic research and the EGG summerschool, which he organized for 20 years. Recently, he took over the editorship of the Rivista di Grammatica Generativa and is working to give it a new and different life.

His current research focuses on finding the functional sequence of verbal clauses, such that it explains the various syncretisms and agglutinations of verbs found in the wild.