Current projects
- The Semantics of Gradable Modal Expressions, NSF project BCS-1053038, PIs: Graham Katz, Paul Portner, Elena Herburger.
- Weak necessity modals and modal discourse.
- Verbal mood and the expression of attitude.
- Annotation of modal meaning in texts. (Workshop, March 2013)
Some recent work
2013. Toward fine-grained annotation of modality in text. [with Hillary Harner, Elizabeth Krawczyk, Daniel Simonson, Graham Katz, and Paul Portner] Proceedings of IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM) [paper]
2013. Figuring out what we ought to do: the challenge of delineating priorities. Proceeding of the 36th Penn Linguistics Colloquium (U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 19, No. 1) [paper]
2012. Mood and contextual commitment. [with Paul Portner] Proceedings of SALT 22 [paper]
2012. Ordering combination for modal comparison. [with Graham Katz and Paul Portner] Proceedings of SALT 22 [paper]
Remarks on the probabilistic comparison approach to weak necessity. Ms. [pdf]
2012. Roots of Modality. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. [pdf]
2012. Straddling the line between attitude verbs and necessity modals. Paper presented at the Modality Workshop @ OttawaU [handout]
2012. Developing a methodology for modality type annotations on a large scale. [with Dan Simonson, Joo Chung, Hillary Harner, Graham Katz and Paul Portner] Paper presented at the Modality Workshop @ OttawaU [slides]
2012. Categorizing modals with Amazon Mechanical Turk. [with Dan Simonson, Joo Chung, and Hillary Harner] Poster presented at the 2nd MACSIM workshop
2011. Projective signals of weak necessity modals. Proceedings of ESSLLI 2011 Workshop on Projective Meaning [paper]
2010. Needing to have but not needing: The limited modal potential of intensional transitive verbs. Poster presented at CUNY 23 [poster]
2010. Decoupling tense and aspect in Chinese. [with Masashi Hashimoto] Manuscript, UMass Amherst [pdf]
2009. Groups in the semantics of reciprocal verbs. Proceedings of NELS 38 [paper]
2009. Between modals and verbs: the dual role of 'must' and 'need'. Poster presented at the 83rd annual meeting of the LSA
2007. Groups in the semantics of reciprocal verbs. Paper presented at NELS 38 and at the conference Reciprocals Cross-Linguistically
2003. Using LSA to detect irony. Paper presented at CL2003 workshop [paper]