jesse aron harris :: homepage

jesse is a third-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 Work

March 26 - 28: Presented poster at CUNY
April 2 - 3: Presented work with Christopher Potts at the OSU Workshop on Projective Meanings, before SALT
April 16 - 18: Presented paper at CLS
April 25: Organized SNEWS

Publications

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. & Christopher Potts (submitted) Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. 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

The Interpretation of Concealed Questions . (2006) Harris, J., Pylkkanen, L., McElree, B. & and Frisson, S. Presented at the Nineteenth 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 2005 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Volumes Edited

Biezma, Maria, Davis, Chris & Harris, Jesse (forthcoming) University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers: Papers in Pragmatics. Volume 39. GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.

Grant, Margaret & Harris, Jesse (forthcoming) University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers: Recent Work on Ellipsis. Volume 38. GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.

Class Handouts, Notes and Miscellaneous

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.

How do you answer a concealed question? A flexible approach. Handout from talk given at Southern New England Workshop on Semantics , October 2007 at MIT.

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 .

A tutorial on donkey anaphora for Angelika Kratzer's 610 Semantics course. The style of the tutorial is that of a dialogue between the teacher and student, and was modeled after both David Lewis' great short piece "Holes" and Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess .

jesse aron harris