Near Ibirapuera park, in São Paulo
I am a 5th-year PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Maryland, in College Park. My advising committee is Valentine Hacquard, Paolo Santorio, Fabrizio Cariani and Aron Hirsch.
I specialize in formal semantics and its interface with syntax and pragmatics. I am particularly interested in non-trivial interactions between modal and temporal language. My dissertation looks into the nature, meaning and distribution of non-scheduled, future-oriented uses of the present ('If John gets a new job, he's very luck').
I'm a member and former organizer of Meaning at Maryland, a research group with members from the departments of philosophy and linguistics.
Before coming to Maryland, I completed a Master's in Linguistics and a Bachelor's in Linguistics and Portuguese Language/Literature at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, with Marcelo Ferreira as my advisor.
You can reach me at jmendes@umd.edu
Papers & manuscripts
TL;DR: Future-oriented uses of the present include a layer of modality, which I argue comes from a (covert) subjunctive morpheme. This modal behaves like an indefinite, and not like a quantifier.
TL;DR: Would is morphologically, but not semantically, the past of will.
TL;DR: Some polarity sensitive items are banned under negation. The most prominent approach to this problem relies on competition with negative concord items. I show that this approach undergenerates.
TL;DR: Future reference without will or going to is only possible in certain environments. These environments closely resemble those that license certain polarity-sensitive items.
TL;DR: Their interaction with almost and barely suggests that the LF of bare habitual sentences involves existential quantification.
Teaching
As instructor of record
Meaning & Grammar (Fall 2022, University of Maryland)
Undergraduate introduction to semantics and pragmatics
LaTeX, R & Markdown (Winter 2024, University of Maryland)
Winter course [handout: LaTeX for semanticists]
As teaching assistant
Language & Mind (Spring 2023, University of Maryland, instructor: Dr. Peggy Antonisse)
Introduction to linguistics for non-majors
Guest lecture: Why LLMs are not good models of cognition
Philosophy of Language (Spring 2022, University of Maryland, instructor: Dr. Alexander Williams)
Introduction to philosophy of language for linguistics and philosophy students
Meaning & Grammar (Fall 2022, University of Maryland, instructor: Dr. Valentine Hacquard)
Undergraduate introduction to semantics and pragmatics
Guest lecture: Introduction to modality
African Linguistics II (Fall 2018, Universidade de São Paulo, instructor: Dr. Alexander Yao Cobbinah)
Detailed description and analysis of an African language (Baïnounk Gubëeher)
Introduction to Linguistics I (Spring 2018, Universidade de São Paulo, Dr. Ana Paula Scher)
Introduction to linguistics for non-majors
Guest lecture: Introduction to phonetics
