Research
A roughly reverse-chronological list of completed and ongoing projects, with links to data, code, and writeups.
What is the role of the antecedent clause in a conditional? Examining a set of conditional expressions that restrict the tense/aspect of the antecedent clause, this work argues that these all arise from a single modal restriction: some conditional devices require the antecedent to be open in a historical modal base. This suggests that conditionals can invoke modality in the antecedent that is independent of the modal flavor of the consequent, that this is a linguistically-relevant dimension of contrast in conditionals, and therefore that some part of conditional `iffiness’ must be lexically specified. This is difficult to explain under analyses where the antecedent simply restricts the domain of evaluation of the consequent.
Indian English allows for a use of only that differs from its more well-known ‘exclusive’ use. This work attempts to explain certain non-entailed inferences of exclusivity that arise from the use of IE only in terms of interactions between it’s presuppositional meaning and Gricean implicatures.
This project compares patterns of coarticulation in harmonic vs. non-harmonic vowel sequences to understand how a low-level phonetic process interacts with phonological constraints.
This project examines how cross-language interaction affects adaptive speech behavior in multilingual listeners, and possible sources of individual differences.
This project attempts to formulate a semantic account for the distribution and inferences associated with the multi-copula system of Bangla, focusing on the copula verb ach- and its links to the progressive and perfect aspect morphology.
This project examines the phonetic outcome of mixed language processing in the speech of multilingual individuals.
