My primary research interests are in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. The theme of my research is context dependence with the aim of better understanding how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence. My monograph, Events, States and Times. An essay on narrative discourse in English (2016, De Gruyter) investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse, looking at the semantics and pragmatics of the word, now, and past and present tenses in English. My monograph (co-authored with Robert Truswell), Extraction from Coordinate Structures at the Syntax-Discourse Interface, explores interactions between syntactic structure and discourse structure, through a focused case study of patterns of extraction involving the word, and. It is forthcoming with Oxford University Press next year.
My research also explores how literary discourse motivates particular extensions of dynamic-semantic frameworks. In particular, I am exploring the phenomenon of imaginative resistance in fiction and writing a new monograph on garden-pathing in the French novella, Sylvie. The monograph (co-authored with Dag Haug) is entitled Literature as a Formal Language (under contract with Routledge). It is an ode to Richard Montague’s pioneering work in the 1970s.
I have also worked on the phonetics, phonology and documentation of Osage and have active interests in philosophy of language and philosophy of literature (including their intersections, with broader questions in philosophy of art and narratology). My new edited volume, Linguistics meets Philosophy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Please see below for further details. My research can also be downloaded at Google Scholar and ORCID. Here is my Academic Tree.
Events, States and Times. An essay on narrative discourse in English. Warsaw/Berlin: de Gruyter. (2016).
The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times Essays in the Honor of Roger Schwarzschild. (co-edited with Jessica Rett. Springer. (2019)
A course in semantics (co-authored with Terence Parsons and Roger Schwarzschild) Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press (2019)
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