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.
Abstract nouns and change of state in the nominal domain
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 result state 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 result state 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). Result state 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 result state 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 result state 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 result state 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 development. 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 result state 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 under review at Natural Language Semantics.
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.
The Iranian languages
A major research interest of mine is the Iranian languages. While doing my PhD at the University of Arizona, I was part of an NSF-funded research group that studied the grammar of various Iranian languages, including the syntactic properties of complex predicates within the family and their interactions with specificity/definiteness and ellipsis. In this vein, I have worked on complex predicates across the Iranian family, differential object marking in Persian, null anaphora in Zazaki, and second position clitic phenomena in Kurdish and Hawrami.
With my UArizona colleague Amber Lubera, I worked on the sound system of Iron Ossetian, an Eastern Iranian language. This project involved phonetic measurements of the vowels and consonants of the language and an in-depth analysis of its stress system.
A more recent project concerns the expression of mental state predicates via possessive complex predicates in Persian, building on Francez & Koontz-Garboden's (2017) analysis of possessive predication in property concept sentences. The work ties transitive mental state predicates to the structure and semantics of property concepts cross-linguistically while also explaining numerous properties of such predicates in Persian and other languages. The results of this project were presented at the 3rd North American Conference on Iranian Linguistics in April 2023, and at TripleA 10 in June 2023, and has borne fruit in the form of a paper at Natural Language Semantics.