jesse is a fourth-year linguistics graduate student at the university of massachusetts, amherst. his main (linguistic) interests center around linguistic and logical semantics, in particular on the ontological and compositional structure of natural language terms.
past areas of research include the semantics, pragmatics, and processing of concealed questions, event structure in coordinated verb complexes, and issues in the syntax-semantics interface of relative clauses.
recent research concentrates on the semantics/pragmatics divide, focusing in particular on context sensitivity, perspective shifting, and information uptake.
Recent Events
UMOP 39 finally published! Contents here.
Agenda
Contact
Department of LinguisticsUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst
South College, Room 105
150 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01060
Publications
Harris, Jesse A. & Christopher Potts (accepted). Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. Linguistics & Philosophy.
Harris, Jesse A. & Christopher Potts (in press). Predicting perspectival orientation for appositives. In Proceedings from the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
Harris, Jesse A. (in press). Extraction from Coordinate Structures: Evidence from Language Processing. In Proceedings from the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
Harris, Jesse A. (2009). Epithets and perspective shift: experimental evidence. In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers: Papers in Pragmatics. Volume 39, pp. 49 - 76. Biezma & Harris (eds.) GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.
Harris, Jesse A. (2008). On the syntax and semantics of Heim's ambiguity. in The Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. University of California, LA.
Harris, Jesse, Liina Pylkkanen, Brian McElree, & Steven Frisson (2008). The Cost of Question Concealment: Eye-tracking and MEG evidence. In Brain and Language , 107 , pp. 44 -61.
Harris, Jesse & Terry Regier (2004). The Associative Origin of Words. In Proceedings from the 38th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Andronis et al (editors), Volume 38-1
Manuscripts
Harris, Jesse A., Charles Clifton, Jr., & Lyn Frazier (submitted). Processing and Domain Selection: Quantificational Variability Effects. Ms. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Revealing
Concealment: A (Neuro-)Logical Investigation of Concealed Questions
Masters of Logic Thesis (2007). Institute for Logic, Language, and
Computation at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Under the supervision
of Paul Dekker, Liina Pylkkanen, and Martin Stokhof.
N.B. The syntactic account of this thesis has been improved on in Harris (2008). The psycholinguistics work presented here has been published as Harris et al (2008). I am currently revising the semantics proposal.
Presentations and Posters
Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives . (2009) Harris, J. A. & Potts, C. Paper presented at the OSU Workshop on Projective Meanings.
Locality, Event-Construal & Extraction: Evidence from Language Processing . (2009) Harris, J. A. Presented at the 22nd Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference.
On the Event-Extraction Correlation: Evidence from Coordinate Structures . (2009) Harris, J. A. Presented at the Proceedings of the 45th Chicago Linguistic Society.
On the syntax and semantics of Heim's ambiguity. (2008) Harris, J. A. Presented at the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. University of California, LA.
How do you answer a concealed question? A flexible approach. (2007) Harris, J. A. Presented at Southern New England Workshop on Semantics at MIT.
The Interpretation of Concealed Questions . (2006) Harris, J., Pylkkanen, L., McElree, B. & and Frisson, S. Presented at the 19th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference.
The roles of the right hemisphere and the anterior midline field in semantic processing: MEG studies. (2005) Pylkkänen L, Murphy GL, McElree B, Harris JA, Francis J, Martin AE & Llinás R. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
Volumes Edited
Grant, Margaret & Jesse A. Harris (forthcoming) University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics: Recent Work on Ellipsis. Volume 38. GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.
Biezma, Maria & Jesse A. Harris (2009) University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics: Papers in Pragmatics. Volume 39. GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.
A Corpus, Class Handouts, Notes and Miscellaneous
Embedded appositives. An annotated collection of 278 sentences containing appositives embedded syntactically in the complement of propositional attitude predicates and verbs of saying, drawn from 177 million words of novels, newspaper articles, and TV transcripts. Intended to inform work on appositives, conventional implicatures, and textual entailment. Includes a Javascript interface, an XML corpus, and a short write-up describing the data and their theoretical relevance.
Lab Blog for Linguistics 510 , as Angelika Kratzer's Intro to Semantics, when I was her TA. The blog includes short discussion, handouts, and links to readings.
Two Roads to Heim's Ambiguity. From a presentation in Kyle Johnson's Seminar in Syntax, October 2007. I argue that Heim's ambiguity for Concealed Questions reflects a structural ambiguity between a Raising Analysis and a Matching Analysis of relative clauses. Evidence from Antecedent Contained Deletion, extrapostion, superlative adjectives, and the (non-)reconstruction of determiners is presented.
Notes from Lecture on Concealed Questions Guest Lecture in Semantics II. April 2005. NB: These notes portray a landscape of some of the influential analysis of CQs and are neither exhaustive nor original .