Research

These are my current research interests and recent publications. The organization of the sections is somewhat arbitrary, since some of the papers pertain to more than one topic. You can find my presentations here.

Only some papers below have links to the full texts. If you can't find one of my publications, please email me.

    Typologies of meaning, factivity

My research focuses on how lexical, contextual, and pragmatic factors affect interpretation in systematic ways.  Identifying and testing for different types of meanings is part of this endeavor.

• Amaral, Patrícia and Fabio Del Prete. Ms. Aprehensional particles in Romance

• Amaral, Patrícia and Fabio Del Prete. 2020. Predicting the end: Epistemic Change in Romance. Semantics and Pragmatics 13: 1-46. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.11​

• Amaral, Patrícia and Manuel Delicado Cantero. 2019. Not a fact: A synchronic analysis of el hecho de and o facto de. Probus: International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics, 31: 1.-27.

• Amaral, Patrícia. 2019. Descriptive pronouns. In: Secondary content. The linguistics of side issues, ed. by Daniel Gutzmann and Katharina Turgay, 58-86. Brill (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface).

• Amaral, Patrícia. 2018. Expressive meaning. Pragmatik-Handbuch (Handbook of Pragmatics), ed. by Frank Liedtke and Astrid Tuchen, 325-33. Springer/Metzler.

• Amaral, Patrícia and Fabio Del Prete. 2017. Modality, presupposition and discourse: the meaning of European Portuguese afinal and Italian alla fine. Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12. Selected Papers from the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Campinas, Brazil [RLLT 12], ed. by Ruth Lopes, Juanito Avelar and Sonia Cyrino, 1-13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

• Amaral, Patrícia and Fabio del Prete. 2016. On truth unpersistence: at the crossroads of epistemic modality and discourse. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (published online first, Jan. 7, 2016).

• Amaral, Patrícia, de Paiva, Valeria, Condoravdi, Cleo, and Zaenen, Annie. 2012. Where’s the meeting that was cancelled? Existential implications of transitive verbs. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon, Mumbai, India, 183-94. The COLING 2012 Organizing Committee. 

• Amaral, Patrícia, Roberts, Craige, and Smith, E. Allyn. 2007.  Review of The Logic of Conventional Implicatures by Chris Potts. Linguistics and Philosophy 30:707-749.  Preprint

    Semantics and pragmatics of scalar adverbs 

I have worked on the interpretation of approximative adverbs like English almost and barely, Spanish casi and apenas, Portuguese quase, mal, por pouco, Italian quasi. This has led me to look into related topics, e.g. cross-categorial manifestations of gradability and the semantics of focus particles. In my dissertation, I focused on the semantic distinctions encoded by approximative adverbs in my native language, European Portuguese. The meaning of these adverbs was used as a test case to investigate the properties of different types of implications, like presuppositions and conventional implicatures. 

• 2011  The puzzle of quasi prima ‘almost before’ and quasi dopo ‘almost after’ (with Fabio del Prete). Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 2009. Paper

• 2010  Approximating the limit: the interaction between quasi ‘almost’ and some temporal connectives in Italian (with Fabio del Prete). Linguistics and Philosophy 33(2): 51-115. Link to publication Preprint    

• 2009  Discourse and scalar structure in non-canonical negation (with Scott Schwenter). Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 35.

• 2007   The meaning of approximative adverbs: Evidence from European Portuguese. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, OSU.

• Annotated Bibliography on Presupposition Accommodation (for the Interdisciplinary Pragmatics Project, OSU), available here.         

   Experimental approaches to Semantics and Pragmatics

 I am interested in the contribution of experimental methods to the study of meaning in natural languages. Are theoretical categories like 'entailment', 'presupposition' and 'implicature', traditionally assumed in Semantics and Pragmatics, relevant in the way people acquire and use language? As part of my dissertation, I did a study on the interpretation of almost and barely trying to address this question (6th paper below). This was also part of the theoretical agenda behind my work on acquisition. 

• Backgrounding and accommodation of presuppositions: an experimental approach (with Chris Cummins and Napoleon Katsos). To appear in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17.

• Children's knowledge of scales and the acquisition of almost. In Beyond Words. Content, context, and inference, ed. by Liedtke, F. & Schulze, C. Mouton Series in Pragmatics (MSP). Mouton de Gruyter.

• 2012 Experimental investigations of the typology of presupposition triggers (with Chris Cummins and Napoleon Katsos). Humana Mente (Special Issue on Philosophical Perspectives on Experimental Pragmatics). Available here.

•   2010 Almost means 'less than': preschoolers' comprehension of scalar adverbs. On-line Proceedings Supplement of BUCLD 34, 2010. Paper

•   2010 Children build on pragmatic information in language acquisition (with Eve V. Clark). Language and Linguistics Compass 4(7): 445 - 457.  Preprint

•   2010 Entailment, assertion, and textual coherence: the case of almost and barely. Linguistics 48(3): 525 - 545.

    Semantic change

 This is where my background in Historical Linguistics meets my interest in the study of meaning. My research focuses on Portuguese and Spanish (and Romance languages in general). My recent work uses distributional methods and tackles both methodological and theoretical questions: How can we measure change using word embeddings? How do these methods fare with small datasets? How do the representations produced by these models contribute to our understanding of meaning and how it changes over time?

• 2022. Amaral, Patrícia and Manuel Delicado Cantero. 2022. Noun-based constructions in the history of Portuguese and Spanish. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

• 2022 Amaral, Patrícia and Dylan Jarrett. Causality and the PA/SN distinction. Linguistics. An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences. 

www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2021-0112/html 

• 2022 Amaral, Patrícia, Zuoyu Tian, Dylan Jarrett and Juan Escalona Torres. Tracing semantic change in Portuguese: A distributional approach to adversative connectives. Journal of Historical Linguistics. 

https://benjamins.com/catalog/jhl.21028.ama

• 2021 Zuoyu Tian, Dylan Jarrett, Juan Escalona Torres and Patrícia Amaral. BAHP: Benchmark of assessing word embeddings of Historical Portuguese. Proceedings of SIGHUM 2021.

https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.13/

• 2021 Amaral, Patrícia. 2021. Social factors in semantic change. In: Manuel Díaz-Campos (ed.), Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish, 509-520. London: Routledge.

• 2021 Hu, Hai, Patrícia Amaral and Sandra Kübler. 2021. Word embeddings and semantic shifts in historical Spanish: Methodological considerations. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 

https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/37/2/441/6357326

• Amaral, Patrícia. 2020. Bocado: Scalar semantics and polarity sensitivity. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 136.4: 1114-1136.

• 2018. Amaral, Patrícia. Current perspectives on Historical Linguistics. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics, ed. by Kimberly Geeslin, 582-602. Cambridge University Press.

• 2018. Amaral, Patrícia and Manuel Delicado Cantero. Subcategorization and change: A diachronic analysis of sin embargo (de que). Contemporary trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected Papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015, ed. by Jonathan McDonald, 31-48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

• 2016 Amaral, Patrícia. When something becomes a bit. Diachronica. International Journal of Historical Linguistics. 33(2).151-86.

• 2012  Nominal and verbal plurality in the diachrony of the Portuguese Present Perfect. (with Chad Howe). In Verbal Plurality and Distributivity, ed. by Brenda Laca and Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr, 25-53. Series Linguistische Arbeiten, De Gruyter. Preprint 

• 2010   Detours along the Perfect Path (with Chad Howe). In Romance Linguistics 2009. Selected papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Tucson, Arizona, March 2009, by Colina, Sonia, Antxon Olarrea and Ana Maria Carvalho (eds.) [CILT 315].

• 2006  The polysemy of mal in European Portuguese: a diachronic analysis. In Journal of Historical Pragmatics 7:1, 1-37.

   Language contact

 The papers below resulted from a joint project with Clancy Clements (Indiana University) and Ana Luís (University of Coimbra) on Barranquenho, a contact language spoken on the southern border of Portugal and Spain. So far our work has focused on the pronominal clitic system of Barranquenho.

• 2011 Spanish in contact with Portuguese (with Clancy Clements and Ana Luís), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, ed. Manuel Díaz-Campos, Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics.

• 2008  Cultural identity and the structure of a mixed language: the case of Barranquenho (with Clancy Clements and Ana Luís). Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 34, Special session on Pidgins, Creoles, and Mixed Languages.

• 2008  Barranqueño: una lengua de contacto ibérica (with Clancy Clements and Ana Luís). Estudios Portugueses 6. Revista de Filología Portuguesa. Salamanca.

      Discourse anaphora

Both papers below investigate the pragmatic constraints on the use of subject pronouns in European Portuguese and Spanish. I haven't worked on this topic for a while, but I am still intrigued by it. More quantitative analysis from large corpora is needed in this area.

• 2005  Contrast and the (non-) occurrence of subject pronouns (with Scott A. Schwenter). In David Eddington (ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 116-127.  Paper

• 2004  Inferrables with Pronominal Subjects in European Portuguese: Implications for Theories of Discourse Anaphora. In António Branco, Tony McEnery and Ruslan Mitkov (eds.), Proceedings of DAARC 2004 (5th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium). Lisbon: Colibri, 1-7.