About

Currently working on: Communication without Common Ground: Arguing for and developing an alternative to the common-ground based model of conversation -- see my recent paper in Linguistics and Philosophy 'Availability Without Common Ground'. I've also worked on Implicature, Convention, Bridging and definiteness, and Disjunction. I am the Director of the Program in Linguistics at CMU and an Associate Editor of Semantics and Pragmatics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Algorithm
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• History

Selected publications

• Availability without common ground

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2025-02-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The dominant model of linguistic communication in current philosophy of language, semantics and formal pragmatics is centered around the idea that communication involves interlocutors coordinating with respect to a single body of information, the common ground. This body of information is understood to serve two central roles: it is the target of speech acts, and constitutes the information available to interlocutors for planning and interpreting utterances. In this paper, I provide a series of examples which show that, contra the dominant model, the information available to interlocutors cannot be modeled as common ground information. The examples involve interpreters making use of background information which cannot become common ground either because the interpreter refuses to accept it, or because the communicative situation is what Harris (2020) calls publicity averse . I consider and disarm a variety of responses that might be offered on behalf of the common ground view, including alternative construals of acceptance and of publicity. I demonstrate that a model of communication in which interlocutors maintain separate representations of their own and their interlocutors' information states easily accommodates these cases, taking as an example the model due to Heller and Brown-Schmidt (2023). I end the paper with the observation that my conclusions do not pose any threat to formal models of dynamic semantics/pragmatics, as these can be, and in some cases already are, interpreted as modelling the evolution of individual information states

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring Bias and Agreement in Large Language Model Presupposition Judgments

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Identifying linguistic bias in text demands the identification not only of explicitly asserted content but also of implicit content including presuppositions.Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising automated approach to detecting presuppositions, yet the extent to which their judgments align with human intuitions remains unexplored.Moreover, LLMs may inadvertently reflect societal biases when identifying presupposed content.To empirically investigate this, we prompt multiple large language models to evaluate presuppositions across diverse textual domains, drawing from three distinct datasets annotated by human raters.We calculate the agreement between LLMs and human raters, and find several linguistic factors associated with fluctuations in human-model agreement.Our observations reveal discrepancies in human-model alignment, suggesting potential biases in LLMs, notably influenced by gender and political ideology.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An investigation of definiteness as a trigger of bridging

  Glossa Psycholinguistics · 2025-03-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A bridged interpretation of a noun phrase (NP) is one in which the referent is understood to stand in some unstated relation to an entity or event previously mentioned in the discourse. For example, in the sequence Yasmin approached the house. The door was open., the NP the door is naturally interpreted as referring to a door of the just-mentioned house. In the theoretical literature, definiteness is often identified as the key driver of bridged interpretations, requiring an alternative analysis for bridged indefinites (Yasmin approached the house. A door was open.). We contrast this two-phenomena approach with a one-phenomenon approach, whereby bridging inferences are understood to be the result of general considerations of discourse coherence, particularly facilitated by entity relatedness, but also responsive to effects of definiteness. We present two new methods aimed at measuring the ease and strength of participants’ bridging inferences when entity relatedness and definiteness are manipulated. The two-phenomena view predicts that definiteness has a distinctive role to play in inducing bridged interpretations, but contra this view, our results show no independent effect of definiteness. Rather, Experiment 1 (a dialogue-continuation task that probes the presence of bridged interpretations) shows only a main effect of entity relatedness. In Experiment 2 (a self-paced-reading task that probes processing difficulty when a potential bridge is broken), we find an interaction whereby high entity relatedness and the presence of the definite together induce an early commitment to a bridged interpretation. We take these findings to support a unified account in which definite NPs do not require a separate bridging mechanism, but rather are treated like other NPs in being subject to the joint satisfaction of a set of linguistic and more broadly pragmatic constraints.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Preconditions and projection: Explaining non-anaphoric presupposition

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2024 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  Abstract In this paper we articulate a pragmatic account of the projection behavior of three classes of non-anaphoric projective contents: the pre-states of change of state (CoS) predicates, the veridical entailments of factives, and the implication of satisfaction of selectional restrictions. Given evidence that the triggers of these implications are not anaphoric, hence do not impose presuppositional constraints on their local contexts, we argue that the projection behavior of these implications cannot be explained by the standard Karttunen/Heim/van der Sandt proposals. But we recognize that parallels between the projection behavior of these implications and the projection behavior of anaphorically-triggered implications must be explained. The current account offers a unified explanation of why the predicates in question give rise to projection at all; why projection of these implications is susceptible to contextual suppression; and why projection is systematically filtered in the standard Karttunen filtering environments, despite the absence of contextual constraints. We demonstrate that our account largely makes the same predictions for filtering of anaphoric and non-anaphoric presuppositions, and briefly support the claim that in the case of disjunction, filtering in the two cases is not fully parallel, as predicted by our account. We also briefly discuss how the well-documented variability in projection across predicates in the same semantic class can be understood within our approach.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On Heim’s “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions”

  Studies in linguistics and philosophy · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Epistemology
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Natural Conventions and Indirect Speech Acts

  The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association · 2019-01-01 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we develop the notion of a natural convention, and illustrate its usefulness in a detailed examination of indirect requests in English. Our treatment of convention is grounded in Lewis’s (1969) seminal account; we do not here redefine convention, but rather explore the space of possibilities within Lewis’s definition, highlighting certain types of variation that Lewis de-emphasized. Applied to the case of indirect requests, which we view through a Searlean lens, the notion of natural convention allows us to give a nuanced answer to the question: Are indirect requests conventional? In conclusion, we reflect on the consequences of our view for the understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide.

  Publisher

• The CommitmentBank: Investigating projection in naturally occurring discourse

  Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) · 2019-07-25 · 181 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper describes a new resource, the CommitmentBank, developed for the empirical investigation of the projection of finite clausal complements. A clausal complement is said to project when its content is understood as a commitment of the speaker even though the clause occurs under the scope of an entailment canceling operator such as negation or a question. The study of projection is therefore part of the study of commitments expressed by speakers to non-asserted sentence content. The content of clausal complements has been a central case for the study of projection, as there is a long-standing claim that clause-taking predicates fall into two classes—factives and nonfactives—distinguished on the basis of whether the contents of their complements project. This claim identifies the embedding predicate as the primary determinant of the projection behavior of these contents. The CommitmentBank is a corpus of naturally occurring discourses whose final sentence contains a clause-embedding predicate under an entailment canceling operator. In this paper, we describe the CommitmentBank and present initial results of analyses designed to evaluate the factive/nonfactive distinction and to investigate additional factors which affect the projectivity of clausal complements.

  PublisherDOI

• 15. Implicature

  2019-02-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article reviews in detail Grice’s conception of conversational implicature, then surveys the major literature on scalar implicature from early work to the present. Embedded implicature is illustrated, and it is explained why this phenomenon poses a challenge to the Gricean view. Some alternate views of conversational implicature are then presented. The article concludes with a brief look at formal appraches to the study of implicature.

  PublisherDOI

• Interpreting Negatives in Discourse

  Research Showcase @ Carnegie Mellon University (Carnegie Mellon University) · 2018-06-29 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Michael Kohlhase and Mandy Simons. Interpreting Negatives in Discourse.

  PublisherDOI

• Automatic Classification of Communicative Functions of Definiteness

  Figshare · 2018-06-29 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Definiteness expresses a constellation of semantic, pragmatic, and discourse properties—the communicative functions—of an NP. We present a supervised classifier for English NPs that uses lexical, morphological, and syntactic features to predict an NP’s communicative function in terms of a language-universal classification scheme. Our classifiers establish strong baselines for future work in this neglected area of computational semantic analysis. In addition, analysis of the features and learned parameters in the model provides insight into the grammaticalization of definiteness in English, not all of which is obvious a priori.

  OA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: What's the question? A cross-linguistic investigation into compositional and pragmatic constraints on the question under discussion

  NSF · $82k · 2015–2019

• Collaborative Research: Semantics and Pragmatics of Projective Meaning across Languages

  NSF · $118k · 2010–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Judith Tonhauser

  University of Stuttgart

  8 shared

• Craige Roberts

  The Ohio State University

  7 shared

• David Beaver

  7 shared

• Stacey Swain

  2 shared

• Kathy Alstat

  2 shared

• Kathleen Jamison

  2 shared

• Chris Dyer

  2 shared

• Lori Levin

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Cornell University

  1998