Research Interests

I am interested in meaning, interpreted broadly. How do we, as language users, understand the meaning of sentences, though we've likely never encountered them before? Where does the meaning come from? The answer must surely lie in the interaction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Though syntax is often regarded as providing a straightforward guide to semantic composition, there are many non-compositional syntactic structures (e.g., Louise sneezed the napkin off of the table). Such structures are often seen as fossilized idioms, though arguments from substitution suggest that the construction itself carries meaning, independent of the particular lexical items (e.g., Louise danced her niece up the stairs).

The question of reference, as well, is tied up in meaning. Lexical items such as she, it, this, so, and such do not carry much meaning without context. Out of the blue, all she tells the hearer is that the referent is an animate female*. The interpretation of she must be fixed for the interpretation of the entire sentence. In local contexts, syntactic structure alone may suffice to establish the correct referent, but even then there may be ambiguity. Both lexical semantics (e.g., implicit causality) and discourse level effects (e.g., coherence relations, QUD) can influence which referent she is taken to refer to. Beyond the level of the sentence, we also find discourse anaphora (e.g., I went to the store today. It took almost 3 hours.) and deixis (e.g., [Pointing at house] That's where my mother lives.), which rely on a combination of semantics and pragmatics for reference resolution.

While much work has been done on reference to objects, reference to events is much less well understood. In I went to the store today. It took almost 3 hours, it refers to a going-to-the-store event, not to the store. In order to understand how reference to events works, we must first understand how the human mind conceptualizes events. Such conceptualization seems to rely on information contained in the lexical entries of verbs (Aktionsart), as well as grammatically encoded aspectual information, aspectual presuppositions from adverbials, and the conceptual properties of the arguments with which the verb combines (e.g., count/mass NPs).

My work seeks to understand these complex interactions of different levels of grammar in determining reference and meaning. I pursue such understanding through a combination of theoretical investigation, corpus studies, and psycholinguistic experimentation.

Current work:

• The effect of referent complexity on the choice of referring expressions in the event domain:
  • Are demonstratives (that) more likely to be used to reference events than are pronouns (it)?
  • Is there a difference in the choice of referring expressions when reference is to a sum of events, rather than an individual event (e.g., Going to the store vs. Going to the store, buying milk, and driving home)?
• The lexical semantics of main verb do:
  • What sorts of eventualities can do stand in for?
  • Why are some types of eventualities more compatible with do than others?
  • Assuming do involves type-shifting/coercion, how does this work? Why is coercion easier with some eventualities than others? (E.g., why does My ears do the hearing sound better than My brain does the knowing?)
• The effects of aspect/boundedness, in both event reference and event representation:
  • How does the perfective/imperfective distinction affect our ability to sum multiple events into one complex event for reference?
  • What role does aspect play in coercion processes? How do Aktionsart, grammatical aspect, and argument boundedness interact to determine the ultimate felicity of an utterance?