My dissertation research explores the interaction of exclusive ('only') meaning with scales. I am investigating various contexts of use in the polysemous Hindi focus particle -hii in order to determine how an exclusive particle can systematically give rise to different types of scalar inferences while retaining a single lexical meaning.
In February 2013, I presented my first account of the lexical semantics of -hii at WCCFL 31. The Proceedings paper that was published is available for free download through Cascadilla Press.
In March 2014, I gave a talk at PLC 39. Then in April 2015 I gave a talk at FASAL 5. Both of these talks were reporting on joint work with Kristen Syrett regarding our results of two judgment studies with -hii. The PLC Proceedings paper that was published is available for free download through Scholarly Commons.
On April 4, 2016 I defended my dissertation, titled Scaling up Exclusive -Hii.
Quantifier-negation scopal ambiguity
This project has explored the role of the "question under discussion" in the resolution of ambiguities arising from the interaction of a quantifier and a negation in English. In the first experiment that was run, overt questions were presented in a Truth Value Judgment Task, involving a video of a story and the presentation of an ambiguous target sentence for the subject to evaluate as true or false with respect to the story. What was found was that overt questions seemed to not drive resolution of the ambiguity as much as expectations arising early on from the context of the story. Furthermore, we found that subject performance varied with respect to how much the context's expectations affected their resolution depending on which lexical items were used for the quantifiers in the ambiguous target sentences.
This work, done in collaboration with Viviane Déprez and Julien Musolino, was presented at CLS 48 in April 2012. The pre-print of the Proceedings paper (which was published in 2014) is available for download at the bottom of this page.
Laryngeal contrast perceptibility
This project used verbal art to probe at phonetic perceptibility of aspiration contrasts. Using a wellformedness judgment task, I presented speakers with Hindi-English bilingual pun jokes that contained imperfect puns whose wordplay was made by altering the aspiration feature either prevocalically and postvocalically. I found that, consistent with Steriade's perceptual distance hypothesis, the postvocalically altered puns were rated more wellformed than the prevocalically altered puns, showing that postvocalic aspiration is less perceptible than prevocalic aspiration.
This work was presented at RUMMIT II in 2011. The handout from the talk is available at the bottom of this page.