Research

Gricean embedded implicatures

A major strand in my work concerns subsentential pragmatic effects. Because pragmatic enrichment has traditionally been viewed as an utterance-level phenomenon, linguists have often felt compelled to abandon pragmatic explanations for phenomena that turn out to live part of their lives below the sentence boundary. My current work aims at preserving the pragmatic analyses by showing how utterance-level enrichment can result in embedded effects when guided by focus and prosody. My dissertation (in progress) argues for a fundamentally Gricean analysis of embedded scalar and relevance implicature.

Epistemic modals and semantic parentheticals

This project addressed the classic puzzle of whether epistemic necessity modals are strong–– for instance, whether English “must P” entails “P”. My main empirical observation was that that all of the discourse behaviors taken as evidence of a strong “must” are also displayed by expressions such as “I guess” and “I suppose” for which neither a lexical nor compositional account would be tenable. Thus I concluded that we independently need pragmatic principles allowing semantically weak embedding predicates to act as pragmatically strong, and proposed an account on which this strengthening is triggered as an instance of Roothian implicational bridging. [paper]

Cross-clausal scope and event structure

In ongoing work with Morwenna Hoeks, Deniz Özyıldız, and Tom Roberts, we look into the availability of extrawide scope (EWS) readings— readings in which a universal quantifier in a finite embedded clause scopes over an existential quantifier in the matrix clause. We show that EWS readings are easily accessible in examples that combine the perfect tense and a buildupical adverbial such as ‘by 2pm’, and observed that these environments share event-structural properties with previously noted exceptions to the putative ban on EWS. We propose an analysis in which EWS is fully available in the grammar but incurs a processing penalty which can be offset when the resulting reading supplies a buildup process that would otherwise need to be accommodated. [paper] [handout]

Factual conditionals and hypothetical commitments

In this work, which began as my MSc thesis (written in the Inquisitive Semantics group supervised by Floris Roelofsen) I used novel empirical observations about embedded response particles to motivate an analysis of conditionals where their antecedents can introduce hypothetical discourse effects. In other words, ‘If it’s raining...’ isn’t restricted to addressing what would be true in a hypothetical scenario where it’s raining, but can in fact be used to address what the speaker would be committed to in a hypothetical discourse where they had asserted that it’s raining. To formalize this idea, I proposed a stack-based dynamic semantics in which updates target fine-grained conversational scoreboards. [paper] [handout]

Experimenting with free choice disjunction

In this project with Morwenna Hoeks, Grzegorz Lisowski, and Alexandre Cremers, we looked into the availability of free choice readings of sentences with a disjunction and a deontic modal. We found that free choice readings are available in both wide and narrow scope configurations, with the former but not the latter requiring a knowledgable speaker. [paper] [slides]

Some other work

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