CASTLFish is the research focus group within CASTL that is engaged in core theoretical research in linguistics, and is a continuation of the original central goals of CASTL as a Norwegian Center of Excellence with its primary remit of theoretical linguistics. CASTL formally ended its ten year stint as a national center in 2013, but continues as a center supported by the Humanities Faculty at UiT, Norway’s Arctic University. CASTLFish started in 2015 as a focused research group with independent annual funding from the Institute for Culture, Literature and Linguistics at the University of Tromsø .

CASTLFish takes as its central research goal the study of the formal properties of language, more specifically the properties of structure and hierarchy, which are unique in natural communication systems. The members of CASTLFish include syntacticians, semanticists and phonologists and cover a wide range of language interests. Many of our members are also members of other research groups and work on acquisition, variation or psycholinguistics in addition to their theoretical interests. We are united however in our interest in the formal descriptive and explanatory properties of natural language, and we form a close knit group that collaborates on issues of architecture within the language faculty and its connection to general cognition within the mind/brain.

The picture of the fish in our banner is a Silver Arowana. We chose it not just because of its elegant shape, but also because it is one of those rare fish that jumps up into Trees.