Research
PhD Dissertation
Exhaustivity and intonation: a unified theory, to be defended on March 23rd, 2017, at the University of Amsterdam.
This dissertation presents a precise, unified and explanatory theory of human
conversation, centered on two broad phenomena: exhaustivity implications and
intonational meaning. In a nutshell: (i) speakers have two types of communicative
intentions, namely information sharing and attention sharing, (ii) these types of
intentions ideally comply with a certain set of rationality criteria, or maxims,
(iii) speakers of English and related languages use intonation, in particular so-called
trailing tones and boundary tones, to indicate whether such compliance is
achieved, and (iv) exhaustivity implications arise when this holds, at least, for the
attention-sharing intention.
Paper copies of my dissertation are available upon request.
Attentional Pragmatics and Exhaustivity
The "standard recipe" in the literature is all wrong! Exhaustivity arises from reasoning about attentional strength, not informational strength (Gricean Quantity).
An attention-based explanation for some exhaustivity operators, in proceedings (2017) of
Sinn und Bedeutung 21, Edinburgh 2016.
More articles
Exhaustivity without the competence assumption, presented at the Semantics/Pragmatics Colloquium, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, November 2013
Attentive pragmatics: an account of exhaustivity and the final rise, presented at the
ESSLLI Student Session, Düsseldorf, August 2013
Meanings as proposals: a new semantic foundation for a Gricean pragmatics Presented at the 16th workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial), September 19-21, 2012, Université Paris-Diderot.
Meanings as proposals: an algebraic inquisitive semantics Presented at the 10th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT), June 18-20, 2012, University of Sevilla.
More presentations
Exhaustivity is a conversational implicature, presented at the
Semantics Research Group, Keio University, Tokyo, October 2013
Attention, exhaustivity and non-cooperativity, presented at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, October 2013
Exhaustivity, relatedness and the final rise, S-circle talk, April 2013, University of California, Santa Cruz
Meanings as proposals: an inquisitive approach to exhaustivity Presented at the NAP-day, October 12, 2012, ACLC, University of Amsterdam.
Experimental/corpus work on contextual underspecification
Cancellation, underspecification and experimental pragmatics, based on joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (UCSC), presented at
SFB Kolloquium, Düsseldorf, July 2014
Ignorance in context: the interaction of modified numerals and QUDs, joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (UCSC), presented at
SALT, New York, May 2014
The QUD-guessing game: how to play it and how to avoid it, based on joint work with Adrian Brasoveanu (UCSC), presented at
Questions in Discourse 5, Stuttgart, May 2014
Intonational Compliance Marking
We use rises and falls to convey (non-)compliance with the conversational maxims.
Grounding topic and focus in biological codes, presented at
TAL, Nijmegen, May 2014
'Attention, I'm violating a maxim!' - a unifying account of the final rise, presented at
SemDial, Amsterdam, December 2013
A pragmatics-driven theory of intonational meaning, presented at McGill, Yale, MIT, and Düsseldorf, May/June/July 2014
A compositional account of contrastive topic in terms of non-cooperativity, presented at
Questions in Discourse, Amsterdam, December 2013
Attentive pragmatics: an account of exhaustivity and the final rise, presented at the
ESSLLI Student Session, Düsseldorf, August 2013
Exhaustivity, relatedness and the final rise, S-circle talk, April 2013, University of California, Santa Cruz
Implicature vs. entailment
Contrary to popular parlour, semantic entailments are in fact weaker than conversational implicatures - though in a somewhat uninteresting sense.
Why semantics is the wastebasket, presented at the Tilburg Research Seminar in Logic and Language, May 2014
Grice can do it (but he was wrong about cancellability), presented at
LEGO, Universiteit van Amsterdam, October 2013
Lexicon-syntax interface and language evolution
Fundamental questions concerning the lexicon-syntax interface can only be answered by taking into account language evolution.
Freistaat Flaschenhals, or How the Language Acquisition Bottleneck Shaped the Lexicon-Syntax Interface. MSc Thesis, Utrecht, March 2011.
The inevitable active lexicon Presented at
8th Workshop of Syntax and Semantics, Paris, November 2011. (The slides are flattened (no transitions); download the source .svg
here.)
How, what for and since when does word meaning influence syntactic composition? Presented at Seminar AI, Utrecht, March 2011.
Reconsidering the code model of communication for simulations of language evolution In A.D.M. Smith, K. Smith and M. Schouwstra, Eds. The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, 2010
Conceptual spaces
A former interest of mine.
Event structure, conceptual spaces and the semantics of verbs With Massimo Warglien and Peter Gärdenfors. Target article (plus comments on comments) in Theoretical Linguistics, Volume 38, Issue 3-4, 2012.
Principles for Concept Combination and Negation The final paper for the MSc course Conceptual Semantics.
Action Representations and the Semantics of Verbs My BSc thesis, in which I connect linguistic phenomena to psychological data, using conceptual spaces as an intermediary level.
Miscellaneous
''Yes'' and ''no'' according to attentive pragmatics, squib, work in progress.
The inquisitive semantics and pragmatics of modified numerals, February 2013, University of California, Santa Cruz
Modified numerals in inquisitive pragmatics, presented at
UGGS, January 2013, University of California, Santa Cruz
Employing Use-cases for Piecewise Evaluation of Requirements and Claims Together with Boschloo, J., Diggelen, J. van, Koelewijn, L.S., Neerincx, M.A., Smets, N.J.J.M. In Proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (2010).
Towards a Connectionist Model for Minimalist Syntax A paper written for the MSc course Neurocognition of Language, in which I formulate a number of tentative principles through which a connectionist model could deal with constituent-free minimalist syntax, using a synchrony-based encoding.
Tools, Language and the Aggregate Mind A philosophical paper for the MSc course Philosophy of A.I., reconsidering the Extended Mind Hypothesis. Based on Dennett's homuncular functionalism I argue for an alternative, the Aggregate Mind Hypothesis.