Research

Meaning

I write about the the semantics and pragmatics of linguistic communication, and the boundary between the two. Roughly, I think of semantics as capturing words' and sentences' context-invariant meanings, whereas pragmatics encompasses the occasion-specific contents speakers transmit to to their audiences.

Framing

I investigate the rationality of linguistic framing effects. I argue that speakers' choices between different possible ways of talking about the same thing can furnish audiences with good reasons for evaluating that thing differently.

Uptake

I conduct research into the role that audience interpretation plays in determining the acts speakers perform - including laypeople's intuitions about that issue. Having started off thinking that all illocutionary acts were uptake-independent, I am now more inclined to think that some depend on uptake.

Digital Speech

I write about social media content moderation and the emerging risks / opportunities of generative AI. I argue that platforms should first assess what a piece of online speech is really doing (in an illocutionary sense) and only then whether it is likely to cause good or bad (perlocutionary) effects downstream.