Context dependency and discourse

From the time I started my dissertation work in New Zealand with the help of Max Cresswell, George Hughes, John Bigelow, and David Lewis, I have been interested in context dependent semantic phenomena, in particular tense, modals and conditionals. During my Amherst time, I became also interested in the context dependency of attitude ascriptions, and certain types of wide-scope indefinites. The guiding idea behind my research on context dependency is that most lexical items are systematic pointers to particular kinds of information that they request to be provided by the utterance context. The question is what exactly the context contributes to the meaning of an expression, and what the linguistic representation of context dependency is. My dissertation Semantik der Rede (Semantics of Discourse) dates from 1978, but the questions I struggled with then are still very much alive these days, and I keep returning to them. A collection of updated and, in some cases, completely rewritten, versions of my papers on modals and conditionals has just come out with Oxford University Press, and a book relating to my 2009 Context and Content Lectures is gradually taking shape and will also be published by Oxford University Press. Since the late eighties I have been exploiting the resources of situation semantics for the semantics of counterfactuals, knowledge ascriptions, and questions. For the 2003 Milan workshop on implicatures and the 2004 Gargnano conference on Covert Variables, I applied a situation-based semantics to some tough puzzles in the area of pragmatics, the projection of conversational implicatures, and the determination of quantifier domains. During the summer of 2006, I wrote an overview of the role of situations in natural language semantics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I share an interest in context-dependency and pragmatics with my colleagues Lyn Frazier and Tom Roeper. In 2004 and 2009, I co-taught seminars on Meaning and Intonation with Lisa Selkirk, which led to an ongoing collaboration on Focus and a paper on phases and default phrase stress.

Cross-linguistic quantification

My interest in cross-linguistic quantification started with a joint NSF grant with Emmon Bach and Barbara Partee, and has been nurtured by having Lisa Matthewson and Seth Cable as colleagues. Most of my work in this area is on indefinites. The first paper, which started circulating in the late eighties, was about the interaction of indefinites with Individual-Level/Stage-Level Predicates. In the nineties, I became interested in wide-scope indefinites. My current work on quantification is comparative and typological. In joint work with Junko Shimoyama, I explored an understudied German indefinite series from the point of view of the much better understood Japanese indeterminate pronouns, which Shimoyama had investigated in her dissertation. More recently, I pursued the hypothesis that all quantificational force for noun phrases might ultimately reside with verbal functional morphology, and the main locus of variation within the nominal domain might be reducible to a well-defined class of domain shifting operations (Indefinites and the Operators they Depend on: From Japanese to Salish).

Syntax-semantics interface

One of the great opportunities for me in Amherst has been the interactions with my colleagues in syntax: Roger Higgins, David Pesetsky, Edwin Williams, Hagit Borer, Peggy Speas, Ellen Woolford, Kyle Johnson, Rajesh Bhatt, and Lisa Green. Kyle Johnson, Rajesh Bhatt and I have taught graduate introductions to semantics or syntax together. My ongoing research on the verbal projection spine is firmly located at the syntax-semantics interface. Originally, I was mainly interested in deriving a theory of voice alternations from slight variations in the way a verb's external argument associates with its head. Over the years, the project became bigger, as it was moving - step by step - towards a theory that eliminated all morphological argument structure changing operations. There is now a largish manuscript on verb semantics (The Event Argument) that has been generating papers on telicity, adjectival passives, resultatives, plurals, and tense. The manuscript has finally grown into something that might be considered a book, and might still be published by MIT Press one day. In the meantime, my main interest has shifted to the higher regions of the verbal projection spine and the syntax and semantics of embedded sentences. During my last sabbatical, I returned to work on pronouns that I started in 1998 (More Structural Analogies Between Pronouns and Tenses). The project was to eliminate stipulations about binding domains for pronouns, and explore how much of a pronoun's behavior can be derived from the meanings of its features and general principles for structure building and morphophonological spellout.

Teaching