the formal pragmatics of fudging. building off of ch. 4 of my dissertation, 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 uphold the pragmatics wastebasket, in the sense that we still need to keep certain elements of analysis out of the semantics, while un-wastebasketing it, in the sense of making it formal and no longer a release valve for shoddy analysis.

• ⊛on unidirectionality in precisification. (2018: linguistics & philosophy 41) this paper seeks to advance a formal optimality-theoretic pragmatic analysis of imprecision, which explains lewis's old observation that standards of precision can be (readily) raised but cannot (readily) be lowered in discourse. the model i propose is a unidirectional, speaker-oriented OT, and therefore is in some ways more similar to recent game-theoretic approaches than bidirectional OT ones. this paper grew out of my attempt to write the paper below, when i found i needed a formal theory of imprecision to work off of.
  
  
• ⊛sobel sequences as imprecision. (2022: mind 131:521) this paper resolves the difficulty posed by sobel sequences, famously tricky sequences of counterfactuals, by keeping to lewis's classic semantics for counterfactuals, but appealing to the theory of imprecision published in my 2018 L&P paper to explain the apparent oddities.
  
  
• ⊖a formal pragamtic account of double access. in this paper i argue for a treatment of double access as a partly pragmatic phenomenon. double access has been a difficult problem for theories of embedded tense, which have for the past several decades been largely built around solving it. i propose that double access can be accounted for without a complicated semantics, by appealing to embedded implicature. this builds off of both my above paper on imprecision, as well as my work on embedded tense. some early developments were presented at SUB 22 (slides). this paper is under review.