Research Interests
I work primarily within formal semantics, and have broad interests within this area. Below I describe some areas of semantics in which I maintain a research interest, and provide some descriptions of current and past research projects.
The construction of stative predicates
In many languages, property concept sentences, the translational equivalents of sentences with predicative adjectives in English, are expressed by possession of an abstract mass noun referring to a quality, e.g. have wisdom instead of wise (Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2017). In some languages, this pattern extends to mental state predicates like love and believe. For example, Persian uses the possessive verb dâshtan ‘to have’ in combination with an abstract mass noun naming the particular mental state: nefrat dâshtan ‘to hate’ (lit. to have hatred), e’teghâd dâshtan ‘to believe’ (lit. to have belief). Similar phenomena occur Sorani Kurdish, Hindi, and Irish. In my work, I connect the analysis of mental state predicates in Persian, Kurdish, and other languages to the analysis of possessive predicating property concept sentence (Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2015; 2017). The analysis proposes that property concept possession, modelled as possession of a portion of an abstract quality following Francez & Koontz-Garboden (2017), lies at the heart of mental state predicates as well. This leads to the development of a novel semantics for mental state nominals, as well as for phrases that introduce the target of a mental state, i.e. for Mary in John has love for Mary. The interaction of target phrases with mental state nouns, along with the gradability of the noun, motivates a revision to Francez & Koontz-Garboden’s analysis of possessive predicating property concept sentences, thus advancing our understanding of the semantics of both mental state predicates and property concept sentences more generally. This work was presented at NACIL3 and TripleA 10, and has borne fruit in the form of a paper published in Natural Language Semantics, which you can find here.
In recent work, I am investigating memory reports, an understudied variety of attitude report that has only recently been the focus of formal semantic research. Neither Persian nor Kurdish possess verbs corresponding to English remember, instead expressing them by means of possessive and locative constructions. I argue that memory reports in Persian and Kurdish show the hallmarks of abstract state predicates (Maienborn 2007; Cable & Crippen 2023; Moltmann 2025). This distinguishes them from imagination reports–to which they have been argued to be reducible in the philosophical and recent linguistic literature (Liefke 2024)–in that imagination reports pass diagnostics for dynamic event predicates. I develop a novel semantics for memory reports inspired by their form and properties in Persian and Kurdish, which serves as the starting point for a broader research program investigating memory reports cross-linguistically. This work has been presented at the 4th North American Conference on Iranian Linguistics, TripleA12, and Sinn und Bedeutung 30. A paper is currently being written (check back soon!).
Change of state in the nominal domain and the construction of change of state predicates
The syntactic and argument structural properties of nominalizations have been explored in great detail. However, though propositional and eventive readings of nominalizations have been extensively studied (Zucchi 1993; Grimm & McNally 2015), less attention has been paid to the detailed semantics of nominals encoding change of state. I argue that a subset of these nominals, such as growth, improvement, and expansion, which I refer to as partial change nominals, possess uses that distinguish them from other eventive nominalizations, and group them with quality nouns referring to property concepts like courage, beauty, and strength (Tovena 2001; Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2017). I develop an analysis of partial change nominals on which their stative component is modeled as a portion of an abstract quality (Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2017), derived as the mereological remainder of the portion of quality possessed at the end of an event and the portion possessed at the beginning of the event (Cotnoir & Varzi 2019). partial change nominals inherit the parthood and size orderings defined on the qualities from which they are derived, explaining the properties they share with quality nouns.
In addition to relating partial change nominals to quality nominals, the analysis also gives rise to a quality-based account of change of state, and raises questions about the relationship between category and the expression of change of state. For instance, while English partial change nouns are generally deverbal, in other languages, such as Persian and Japanese, the direction of derivation is often reversed, with the verbal change of state predicate derived from a partial change noun combined with a light verb.
The results of this project have been presented at CLS60 and Sinn und Bedeutung 29 in Noto, Sicily. A paper is currently under review. In ongoing research, I am extending my work in this domain to other languages, focusing on Persian, Sorani Kurdish, and Japanese, and examining the properties of the translational equivalents of English partial change nominals.
State/Change-of-State Lability as Type-Shifting
In collaboration with my colleagues Andrew-Koontz-Garboden and Jens Hopperdietzel at the University of Manchester, I am working on the analysis of state/change-of-state lability, where, in some languages, normally stative verbs are interpreted as change of state verbs when they occur in the context of material that requires a dynamic eventive meaning (Koontz-Garboden 2007; Bowler et al. 2022). Crucially, change-of-state meaning does not arise in the absence of such event-selecting expressions. In ongoing work, we have developed an analysis of this phenomenon in terms of type-shifting, where a predicate of states is shifted to a predicate of events describing a change into that state in order to avoid a local type clash with event-selecting expressions. Combined with a Blocking Principle along the lines of that in Chierchia (1998), the analysis makes correct typological predictions: languages without inchoative morphology on verbs, such as Tongan and Mandarin, permit change-of-state type-shifting, while those with overt inchoative morphology, such as English, do not. This work thus bears on the second question above: the locus of inchoative semantics lies in type-shifting operations in some languages, but in the semantics of overt morphemes in others. Results from this research have been presented at GLOW 46, CLS 59, and WCCFL 41, with a paper published in Natural Language Semantics. You can read it here.
Event and argument structure
I work on event and argument structure, focusing primarily on verb semantics and how eventive predicates associate with their arguments. One major strand of this research, carried out in collaboration with Jianrong Yu, investigates cases of so-called agentless presuppositions with again, in which the agent may be excluded from the presupposition of again with transitive verbs, as in ‘John hit Jim, and Mary hit him again,’ but not with intransitives, as in ‘#John danced, and then Mary danced again’ (Bale 2007). The variable availability of this type of presupposition has the potential to tell us something about how agent arguments are introduced syntactically: intransitive verbs that typically resist agentless presuppositions permit them if they occur with a hyponomous object (‘John danced the Irish jig. Then, Mary danced the Irish jig again’), or if a PP argument is added (‘Fido barked at the cat. Then, Rover barked at it again’). We argue that eventive verbal roots denote functions from thematic roles to relations between individuals and events, and the differential availability of agentless presuppositions depends on whether a thematic role and internal argument is introduced locally to the verb root or not. The results of this and related projects have been presented at the 94th LSA in New Orleans, LA, and at WCCFL 38 in Vancouver, BC. A journal article representing the culmination of this project was recently published in Natural Language and Linguistics Theory. You can read it here.
Similative plurality
Earlier research of mine focused on understudied types of plurals, particularly similative plurals. An example of a similative plural is m-reduplication in Persian, which has a non-uniform plural interpretation in upward-entailing contexts that is weakened in downward-entailing and non-monotone environments, as well as in pragmatic contexts establishing speaker ignorance or indifference. A similar phenomenon is observed with the Japanese particles -ya, -toka, and -tari. Early work on this topic, done in collaboration with Ryoichiro Kobayashi (Tokyo University of Agriculture) developed an account of the Japanese facts based on alternative semantics, according to which -ya/-toka/-tari introduce alternatives that are operated upon differently according to the semantics of the environment in which they appear, yielding their variable semantic behavior. Work relating to this project has been presented at ConSOLE XXV, GLOW in Asia XI and Sinn und Bedeutung 22, among others. In my single-authored work, I developed an account of m-reduplication in terms of scalar implicature, extended it to the analysis of the Japanese cases discussed above, and presented this work and further refinements of it at the 2018 LSA Annual Meeting , Sinn und Bedeutung 23 in Barcelona, and CLS 55 in Chicago.
My dissertation, Similative Plurals and the Nature of Alternatives, provides a synthesis of these two phenomena, improving on previous analyses in a unified framework while elaborating on the broader theoretical implications of the semantics and pragmatics of similative plurality. In particular, I have argued that an implicature-based account of the non-homogeneous plural inference of similative expressions requires appeal to an abstract alternative, an alternative that does not correspond to any lexical item in the language in question. My dissertation also proposes a new analysis of associative plurals, comparing and contrasting their behavior with similatives and exploring a typology of non-homogeneous plurals. A journal article based on my work on similative plurals was published in Semantics and Pragmatics in 2020, which you can read here. I have recently returned to work on similative plurality, investigating the typology of similatives with respect to pragmatic strengthening, in joint work with Yihsun Chen.