Active Projects (Drafts Available Upon Request)
Keeping Count of Copredications - This is about the puzzle of copredication, the quest to find plausible semantic values for sentences like lunch was delicious but lasted for hours. Approaches that reject the underlying metaphysics, though attractive, have difficulty making the right predictions about counting sentences. I propose a solution to accommodate the counting data by suggesting that we don't count entities, but cells of a partition on those entities.
How to Reason Polysemously - Another paper about copredication. After using some inferences to point out striking differences between copredication supporting nouns like lunch and nouns that don't give rise to copredications (e.g. proper names) I argue the inferences are best explained by the presence of a covert predication operator at logical form. The resulting semantics also dissolves the puzzle of copredication.
In Preparation
Who's Afraid of Zeugma? - A paper about differentiating felicitous copredications (e.g. The newspaper has a horrible font and hence should be fined) from infelicitous counterparts (e.g. The newspaper fell of the table and fired its editor). I defend a fully pragmatic theory.
What is #? - A paper about felicity judgements: the state of mind we're in we determine an utterance like It's raining but it might not be is marked or unacceptable. I argue that these judgements are conative (like disgust) and tease out this view's implications for the evidential role of intuitions in linguistic theory.
Truth-Conditional Semantics Tells No Lies - we carefully examine differences between the English word true and the truth-predicate of formal semantics `=1' and argue they don't express the same concept. We then draw some upshots of this view for recent arguments against truth-conditional semantics involving liar sentences.