Maura O'Leary
Semanticist, Field Researcher, & Teacher
I am a graduate student and teaching assistant at UCLA. My dissertation provides a formal model of nominal evaluation times, including nominal lexical aspect, interaction with scopal tense, interactions with the evaluation times of nominal modifiers, and the dynamic effects of novelty on evaluation times. I additionally do both morphosyntactic and revitalization work with the critically endangered Alaskan Dene (Athabaskan) language Hän. Recently, I have also been working on effective pedagogical methods for teaching and evaluation in university-level linguistics courses.
Get in touch at mauraoleary@g.ucla.edu
Latest News
June 2021: I received a $2000 grant from Native Languages of the Americas for the Hän Revitalization Project.
May 2021: I presented a talk on the benefits of Skills-Based Grading at the first Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) Workshop on Inclusive Teaching in Semantics.
April 2021: My paper "Locality constraints in nominal evaluation times" was published.
March 2021: The Hän Revitalization Project just celebrated our first printing! Check out our flashcards and phrasebook here.
March 2021: My paper "Skills-Based Grading: A novel approach to teaching formal semantics" (with Richard Stockwell) was published. Learn more about my pedagogical work here.
February 2021: Invited talk at the University of Oklahoma - "Revitalizing a pronominal system." Slides available on this page.
February 2021: Invited talk at UCSD - "Three Facets of Nominal Temporal Information." Handout available on this page.
January 2021: Talks presented at the LSA - "Skills-Based Grading: A novel approach to teaching formal semantics" & "Locality constraints in nominal evaluation times." Handouts, slides, and associated papers available on this page.
December 2020: Invited talk at UC Berkeley - "Hän Pronominal Prefixes." Slides available on this page.
November 2020: My pedagogy abstract on Skills-Based Grading (with Richard Stockwell) won the LSA's Student Abstract Award! Learn about our project here.
Nominal Evaluation Times
My dissertation, which provides a formal analysis that can predict the available nominal property times for any given noun in any given sentence.