Current projects

Cross-linguistic variation in focus systems

What is a possible focus system? What kinds of meanings can or must be focus-sensitive? What can focus-sensitive operators demand of the alternatives that they invoke?

Discourse management strategies

How do speakers use the gestural, intonational, and lexical resources at their disposal to coordinate expectations, goals, and information states in discourse? In this domain, I am currently focusing on:

• negative gestures (conveying objection, dismissal, etc.), both manual and facial

• discourse particles such as English actually and German eigentlich, which indicate how an utterance relates to the current trajectory of the conversation and may have interesting illocutionary effects (e.g., retraction, revision).

• response particles that modify default levels of commitment and/or engagement (e.g., hell yeah! and no way!, which intuitively convey something stronger than plain yes and no, and meh, which intuitively conveys something weaker than a plain yes or no).

Acquisition of speech acts

[collaborative work with Dan Goodhue, Manfred Krifka, and Kazuko Yatsushiro]  How do children learn that a question elicits an answer, or that a command creates an obligation? How do children learn the felicity conditions and discourse effects of different speech acts, and how does this learning interact with their acquisition of other parts of the linguistic system? 

• experimental investigation currently underway to investigate children's acquisition of imperative speech acts (e.g., commands and permissions) and the tools used to distinguish them (e.g., intonation, discourse particles, contextual cues).