about me

I am a third-year grad student in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. My work is centered on (formal) semantics and pragmatics of natural language, especially Yukatek Maya. Much of my work is concerned with the semantics of various constructions which evoke "alternatives" such as disjunction, indefinites, questions, focus, and conditionals. In addition to semantic fieldwork, I also work on other aspects of the language including phonology, prosody, and syntax.

current projects (downloads here)

Uninformativity and Focus in Questions: As a functional  category, questions (i) introduce alternatives, raising the issue of which alternative holds and (ii) are not informative. Cross-linguistically, questions are generally formed by indefinites that are focused. Previous authors have taken focus in questions to be responsible for (i). This project pursues the idea that the role of focus in questions is to accomplish (ii) by contributing an existential presupposition which obviates the informative potential of indefinites, allowing their latent inquisitive potential to surface.

Non-interrogative Questions in Yukatek Maya: This work examines the semantics and pragmatics of polar and alternative questions in Yukatek Maya. Alternative questions consist of focused disjunctions which are analyzed in terms of the interaction of the existential presupposition of focus and an inquisitive semantics account of disjunctions. Polar questions are analyzed as covert alternative questions where only one disjunct is pronounced. The covert disjunct is interpreted according to general properties of disjunctions (e.g. mutual exclusivity, exhaustivity).