Forthcoming/published 2024

"Metaphor and common ground". To appear in Rivista Italiana di filosofia del linguaggio

Integrating metaphors into pragmatic theory remains a challenge. Grice argued that the tenor of a metaphor is an implicated proposition while Contextualists have argued that it belongs in ‘what is said’ or the Explicature. I show that the contextualist arguments are inconclusive and they leave the role of the vehicle undefined. Moreover, neither the Gricean nor the Contextualist analyses can account for the most highlighted feature of metaphors: their indeterminacy; we cannot be sure as to what a speaker meant with a metaphor, but communication can proceed, nonetheless. I propose that we move away from binary models of

communication (based on what is said/what is implicated) and instead approach the problem from the perspective provided by Common Ground, with special attention paid to the different updates in the discourse models of speakers and hearers that take place when an utterance is 

shared.

“Distributed Morphology and bilingual grammars: Code-switching and mixed languages.” Submitted to Alexiadou, Artemis, Ruth Kramer, Alec Marantz and Isabel Oltra-Massuet (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Distributed Morphology. Cambridge University Press.

Since the early 2010s, there has been an explosion of work in the study of bilingual grammar and code-switching within the DM framework (Alexiadou et al 2015, DenDikken 2011, López 2020, Grimstad et al. 2014). The reason for this interest is that the change in perspective on the theory of grammar provided by DM has given researchers an opportunity to gain fresh insights into bilinguals’ I-languages as well as an approach to long standing empirical problems. Most especially, DM has played a crucial role in the development of the Integrationist Hypothesis, according to which the linguistic competence of a bilingual speaker must be regarded as unitary, not as two separate systems. The purpose of this chapter is to explain what it is that DM brought to the study of bilingual grammar and what the study of bilingual grammar brought to DM. As a novelty, it includes DM analyses of the mixed languages Medialengua and Sri Lankan Portuguese.

‘The conceptual structure of perjury.’ Law and Philosophy  43(5): 475-506. 2024

Douglis (2017) argues that perjury is nothing more than a tool to facilitate court proceedings, conceptually distinct from lying. Instead, I argue that the conceptual structure of perjury and of lying match almost perfectly. Apparent mismatches do not arise as a property of perjury but as a consequence of the judiciary context. I present an overview of some of the recent philosophical work on lies with focus on the problem of ‘what is said’ and pragmatic enrichment. I also discuss the question of whether false implicatures should be regarded as lies, the intent to deceive condition on lying, and the falsity of the statement as a condition on lying. I then turn to perjury and show that the same philosophical problems that lies give rise to are reproduced almost point by point. I show that the oath condition and the materiality condition on perjury, which would seem to provide an empirical distinction, are in fact rooted in our understanding of lies. Against Keiser (2016) and Douglis (2017), I argue that a cross-examination is in fact a form of conversation in Grice’s sense. 

'The meaning of a yawn.' International Review of Pragmatics 16: 281-295. 2024

I present empirical arguments that bodily gestures may communicate a propositional meaning with assertoric force and trigger implicatures based on violations of Relation. Crucial in the analyses are Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning as well as Tim Wharton’s extended argument that bodily gestures instantiate a third type of meaning defined by the spontaneous production of a gesture and the explicit exhibition of it.

'Remarks on the syntax of bare nouns in Papiamentu.' With Carmen Parafita-Couto, Charlotte Pouw, Rodi Laanen. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 2024

This article presents an argument that bare (singular) nouns in Papiamentu include additional functional structure, as proposed in Kester and Schmitt (2007). The argument is based on Dutch-Papiamentu code-switched noun phrases and exploits the crucial datum that a Dutch bare noun is grammatical when inserted in a Papiamentu sentence, although bare nouns are ungrammatical in a Dutch unilingual sentence. We propose that this datum can be accounted for if the Dutch bare noun is the complement of a silent Papiamentu category, D or Num. 

'The role of INFL in code-switching: A study of a Papiamentu heritage community in the Netherlands.' With Carmen Parafita-Couto, Charlotte Pouw, Rodi Laanen. Frontiers in Psychology. 2:1288198. doi: 10.3389/flang.2023.1288198. 2024.

In heritage bilingualism studies, code-switching has often been overlooked, with a focus on either the heritage language or the dominant societal language of the bilingual individual. However, exploring code-switching can provide valuable insights into heritage speakers’ grammar, revealing patterns that may not be apparent when only examining monolingual speech. Recent

research suggests that in code-switched clauses, functional elementsmust align with the language of verbal inflection (INFL), which encompasses tense, aspect,voice, and agreement. This generalization is usually referred to as the Matrix Language Frame (MLF). The present study explores the empirical validity of this generalization using an experimental protocol that controls for variables that earlier work did not take into consideration. These variables are (a) adjacency between INFL and the functional element, (b) the interaction of the MLF with embedded islands, and (c) the possibly degrading e􀀀ects of inserting a functional category. Thus, the aim of this study is to provide evidence in support (or not) of the INFL constraint beyond the experimental limitations in earlier work. The study focuses on the bilingual combination Papiamentu-Dutch. Our results, by and large, support the MLF generalization.