Towards an ontology of modal flavours

modal flavours wordleI’m still feeling warm and fuzzy from the wonderful workshop we had last week at the DGfS conference about modal flavours. The idea for this workshop had formed last year during the SIAS summer institute on the investigation of linguistic meaning, together with Ryan Bochnak and Anne Mucha. We were very happy to win Aynat Rubinstein as our invited speaker and get some excellent submissions from various subfields of linguistics. We gave an overview of background motivations and common themes of the talks in our introduction.

Out now: Indefinites in Daakaka (Vanuatu)

There are two indefinite articles in the Oceanic language Daakaka, TUSWA and SWA. Like weak NPIs or unspecific indefinites in many other languages, TUSWA is excluded from positive assertions about the episodic past or present. In this paper, I try to locate them within the cross-linguistic space of indefinites and NPIs and sketch out an approach to account for their differences.

Read the full paper here.

Poster for Sinn und Bedeutung 2016

SuB2016DaakakaDistal_posterI’m excited about the upcoming Sinn und Bedeutung conference in Edinburgh. The program looks very promising and I’ll have an opportunity to discuss some of my latest thoughts on the Daakaka distal and modal semantics more generally. If you can’t come but would like to see my poster, here it is.

SuB2016DaakakaDistal_poster

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