About

Jessica Rett is a Professor of Linguistics at UCLA, specializing in semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language. She earned her BA in Linguistics from the University of Michigan and her PhD in Linguistics from Rutgers University. In 2026, she was appointed the Inaugural Bye & Bohne Endowed Chair of Public Linguistics at UCLA. Her research focuses on using logic to model the knowledge people have when they understand the meaning of language. She aims to expand the traditional boundaries of compositional semantics to include context-sensitivity, illocutionary content, and semantic entities beyond individuals. Recently, she has worked on applying formal semantics and pragmatics tools to public engagement, including media and consulting projects, as well as a large-scale investigation into semantic variation in medical diagnoses, particularly the term "cancer."

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Physics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mathematics
• Medicine

Selected publications

• The Semantics of Degree Relatives

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2025-10-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Relative clauses can range over degrees, just as they can range over individuals. But this class of degree relatives is rarely studied uniformly across the diverse constructions they help form. As a result, there have been a number of construction-specific proposals to model the semantics of degree relatives: in equatives, amount relatives, and wh -exclamatives. The goals of this article are to review a standard semantics of relativization writ large, to supplement it with standard assumptions from degree semantics, and to explain how the previously strange behavior of a variety of constructions formed from degree relatives comes out as a natural consequence of a handful of straightforward assumptions. Specifically, I argue that degree relatives are just relative clauses that range over degrees, and that these degree readings of relative clauses are available wherever we have ( a ) the appropriate morphology (e.g., a relativizer that can range over degrees), ( b ) a context of utterance that makes salient some informative (monotonic) dimension of measurement, and ( c ) an individual referent that is associated with a single, determinate measure along that dimension in the context of utterance.

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• Characterizing illocutionary content

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2025-03-31 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  There are at least two semantic distinctions made in the literature: the (not-)at-issue distinction, and the distinction between descriptive and illocutionary or use-conditional content (Kaplan 1997; Horn 2013; Rett 2021b). Two phenomena that have traditionally been characterized as illocutionary are illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers (e.g. frankly). Most treatments of not-at-issue content don’t differentiate between illocutionary content and descriptive not-at-issue content, like that encoded in appositives or conventional implicature. Those that do can’t model both illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers, or require additional formal apparatuses to do so. The goal of this paper is to present a unified and natural account of illocutionary content. I argue that all illocutionary content has in common that it is discourse-anaphoric to the speech event. As a result, we can model all of these types of content as (different kinds of) Common Ground update, in the Stalnakarian sense. I provide a formal account of this model, and argue that it makes certain novel and correct predictions about how encoders of illocutionary content behave, and how they’re encoded.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Linguistic Framing in “Cancer” and “Cancer”-Adjacent Terms

  Health Communication · 2025-11-05

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Linguistic framing - the use of background conceptual knowledge to interpret language - is a foundational part of how language researchers understand meaning. The specific question we set out to answer concerns the overall trend of overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk, screen-detected cancers and how the terminology used to diagnose them could minimize harm. We tested for a framing effect surrounding "cancer," using one term that is technically a synonym with "cancer" ("carcinoma") and two terms that are potentially but not necessarily closely correlated with cancer: "tumor" and "abnormal cells." We observe that lay people are significantly more likely to associate "cancer" with death and fear than its synonym "carcinoma," and that laypeople are also likely to erroneously interpret "tumor" as synonymous with "cancer" in a diagnostic context. While there are clear and known dangers of using medical jargon in diagnostic contexts, we argue that the potential for miscommunication involving common terms like "cancer" is even more insidious and potentially harmful, because it comes without any signals of interpretive difference. Our findings support a number of recent papers and editorials that stress the dangers to patients of using the scientific label "cancer" in cases of low-risk or non-canonical carcinoma.

  PublisherDOI

• The semantics of cancer: An experimental study in the meaning and use of cancer-related terms among surgical professionals.

  Journal of Clinical Oncology · 2023-06-01

  article

  e24216 Background: Because cancer does not form a natural kind, there is no list of properties that can exhaustively define it. Consequently, philosophers would expect the meaning of the term “cancer” to be subjective and variable, even across medical specialties. We hypothesized that a semantic difference regarding the understanding of “cancer” leads to diagnostic miscommunication. The goal of this multi-phase project is to better understand, quantify and compare expert and non-expert interpretations of the word “cancer” to help address this discrepancy. Methods: A 26-question online survey was administered to 72 English-speaking medical professionals at surgical grand rounds at the University of California, Los Angeles on October 17, 2022. Respondents were provided with 15-20 minutes to complete the survey questions, consisting of: demographics; level of experience with cancer diagnoses; a one-sentence definition of cancer; three words or phrases to describe cancer; ranking four properties as criteria for defining cancer; a short description of six conditions followed by three questions per condition on whether it qualifies as cancer, should be called “cancer,” and ought to be described as “cancer” in diagnosis delivery; ranking 10 cancers provided in order of how much they qualify as a cancer, from most to least "cancer-y." Results: Sixty-three percent of respondents were from surgical disciplines and 22% were attending surgeons. The majority (55%) reported “quite a lot of experience” with delivering cancer diagnoses. On a 7-point Likert scale from “not a cancer” (1 point) to “definitely a cancer,” no result received a 100% ranking in either category: 54% of respondents described micro-papillary thyroid carcinoma (mPTC) as “not a cancer” ( < 6 points) while 53% of respondents described benign metastasizing leiomyomas as cancer ( > 3 points). This suggests a widespread variation and distribution of “cancer” across subjects. While only 46% of respondents thought mPTC was “definitely a cancer,” 71% felt it should be called “cancer” ( p < 0.0001). Conversely, 47% of respondents felt that benign metastasizing leiomyoma did not qualify as a cancer, but this was less significantly related to feeling that the term “cancer” should be avoided in its diagnosis delivery ( p =0.001). Conclusions: The first-phase our study presents the results obtained among surgical professionals. Variability in usage of the term “cancer” points to a gradient of understanding of what qualifies as "cancer" and in what context the term "cancer" should be used. This gradient in semantic understanding of "cancer" contributes to diagnostic miscommunication and leads to over-treatment. Future studies will focus on how different medical professionals and non-professionals understand "cancer," to mitigate misunderstanding in diagnosis and reduce over-treatment.

  PublisherDOI

• Decomposing 'As If'

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2023-01-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ‘As if’ constructions have been analyzed as only verbal (Bücking 2017) or idiomatic (Bledin & Srinivas 2019, 2020). We argue that ‘as if’ constructions have the same distribution as any clausal similative (i.e. any ‘as’ construction): they can associate with verbal arguments or propositions. And we argue that ‘as if’ constructions are a common and productive cross-linguistic phenomenon, reliably formed with a relativizer; a question subordinator; and X-marking. We thus present a compositional analysis of the constructions based on extant analyses of as (and its cross-linguistic counterparts) as a relativizer (Rett 2013, among others); if as a question subordinator (Starr 2014b, among others); and X-marking as encoding a similarity relation across possible worlds (Schulz 2014; von Fintel & Iatridou 2020). In addition to being compositional, this approach can better account for the wide distribution of ‘as if’ constructions both within a language and across languages.

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• A Typology of Semantic Entities

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-10-06 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The goal of this paper is to discuss which basic semantic entities we should include in our formal semantic ontology, and on which principles we should include them (cf. Bach 1986b). The vast majority of formal theories employ individuals as a basic type; they represent quantification over, modification of, and reference to individuals. But many theories include additional types or entities, including possible worlds, but also less common ones like vectors. Some papers have argued that types should be constrained or reduced; others that they should be proliferated. I present some representative arguments on both sides and suggest a path forward in evaluating them against one another.

  PublisherDOI

• The Semantics of Emotive Markers and Other Illocutionary Content

  Journal of Semantics · 2021 · 42 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Linguistics

  Abstract I identify a class of expressions called ‘emotive markers,’ exemplified by fortunately and alas, which encode not-at-issue information about the speaker’s emotive attitude towards the content of the utterances they occur in. I argue that there are important differences emotive markers and other encoders of not-at-issue content, in particular utterance modifiers like frankly or evidential adverbs like apparently. In contrast to these, emotive markers can result in Moore’s Paradox and always range over their local argument. I conclude that the contribution of emotive markers should be treated as ‘illocutionary content’, on par with the speaker’s other Discourse Commitments (Gunlogson, 2001), and I model this analysis in the dynamic sub-sentential update framework in Farkas & Bruce (2010).

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• A comparison of expressives and miratives

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 21 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Philosophy

  There is a strong and vocal tradition of expressives being characterized as denoting conventional implicatures (Potts 2005 <italic>et seq.</italic>), and some have taken the category of expressives to include exclamation (Zimmermann 2007). But there’s also a tradition of analyzing exclamations and other mirativity markers at the illocutionary or speech-act level (Sadock and Zwicky 1985; Faller 2002; Rett 2011). In this chapter, I address two related questions: What, if any, are the empirical differences between expressives and miratives? And what, if any, are the theoretical differences between conventional implicatures and illocutionary content? Ultimately, I initiate a turf war over expressives: I argue that while they were initially characterized as a subtype of conventional implicature, they are more naturally grouped with emotive, or illocutionary, content.

  PublisherDOI

• Manner implicatures and how to spot them

  International Review of Pragmatics · 2020 · 29 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  Abstract The goal of this paper is to help develop a general picture of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975) by looking beyond scalar implicature to see how the phenomenon behaves in a general sense. I focus on non-scalar Quantity implicatures and Manner implicatures. I review canonical examples of Manner implicature, as well as a more recent, productive one involving gradable adjective antonym pairs (Rett, 2015). Based on these data, I argue that Manner implicatures—and conversational implicatures generally—are distinguishable primarily by their calculability; their reinforceability; their discourse sensitivity (to the Question Under Discussion; Roberts, 1990; van Kuppevelt, 1995; Simons et al., 2011); and their embeddability (under negation, propositional attitude verbs, quantifiers, etc.). I use these data to draw conclusions about the usefulness of implicature-specific operators and about ways to compositionally represent conversational implicatures.

  PublisherDOI

• Eliminating EARLIEST: a general semantics for before and after

  Movebank · 2020-09-18 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Despite recent proposals, there are still empirical gaps in the study of the semantics of temporal relations, including the precise truth conditions of before and after constructions. Theoretically, there is disagreement about whether the constructions involve aspectual coercion operators, like EARLIEST, that privilege certain bounds over others (Beaver and Condoravdi, 2003; Condoravdi, 2010); or whether non-veridical interpretations of before constructions are the result of intensionality or semantic underspecification (Krifka, 2010b). In this paper, I focus on the truth conditions of before and after constructions as they are conditioned by different aspectual classes across languages, and propose a reformulation of the semantics of before and after that characterizes them as antonymic in a particular way inspired by the treatment of comparatives in the degree-semantic literature. I argue that the result is a more empirically comprehensive and explanatory theory of relations between ordered plurals in general.

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Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Altshuler

  2 shared

• Rajam Raghunathan

  2 shared

• Sarah E. Murray

  2 shared

• Frederick C. Eilber

  1 shared

• Margaret Grant

  Simon Fraser University

  1 shared

• Nina Hyams

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Sonia Michniewicz

  Northwestern University

  1 shared

• William B. Starr

  Cornell University

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Linguistics

  Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

  2008

• BA, Linguistics

  University of Michigan

  2001