1. dissertation work.(diss; overview)
my dissertation bridging the divide: scalarity & modality (2014), which comprised three core projects, which continue to engender new projects.2. the pragmatics of fudging. (3 papers)
this is a project which seeks to investigate the foundations of pragmatic interpretation generally, while specifically focusing mostly on imprecision; a major goal of this program is to show that many phenomena which have been treated as semantic can be explained as pragmatic.3. temporality i: modality & tense.(3 papers)
this project examines the relationship between time and modality, particularly focusing on the constraints placed on temporal orientation by the presence or absence of modals.4. temporality ii: tense & tense.(4 papers)
a sister project to the above, this project examines a different kind of embedded temporal operator: the perfect. a common but not ubiquitous theme in this work is that the perfect has the same type as tenses, and can indeed be identified with the past tense, at least in english.5. the semantics of discourse configurationality.
a joint project with martina martinović in which we investigate the semantics of movement by examining discourse configurationality in wolof. we provide a unifying syntactic and semantic analysis of copular expressions in wolof, which can give rise to exhaustive identification, but also is used for constructions with no special inference of exhaustivity (equatives, nominal predication). we presented some of our work at lsa 2015.6. the semantics and syntax of speech acts.
this nascent project seeks to revive the performative hypothesis, whose main point was that the content of a sentence is what determines its illocutionary force. i presented some preliminary work at QSA-17 in 2017 in which i argue that such a proposal is necessary for to maintain the kratzerian treatment of conditionals, and helpful for explaining biscuit conditionals.7. loose ends.(3 papers)
modal nouns, modal subordination, focus in luganda.