I'm a third-year semanticist. I did my B.A. at Harvard College, where my research involved a series of experiments on adverbial quantifiers (sometimes, usually, etc.) and the extent to which they semantically parallel nominal quantifiers (some, most, etc.).
Since arriving at MIT, I have mainly worked on the semantics of degrees, order, and time in natural language, focusing on ordinal numbers, superlatives, degree modification, aspectual coercion, and adverbials expressing temporal order (before- and after-clauses, at first/at last).
Publications
Alstott, Johanna. (forthcoming). Scalar implicature in adverbial and nominal quantifiers: Two experiments. To appear in Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 59). [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna. 2024. A first semantics for at first and at last. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9(1). [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna. 2023. Ordinal numbers: Not superlatives, but modifiers of superlatives. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 33, 1-20. [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna and Masoud Jasbi. 2020. Lexicalization of quantificational forces in adverbial and determiner domains. In Proceedings of the 42nd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2001-2006. [LINK]
Thesis and Generals Paper
Alstott, Johanna. 2024. Before and after decomposing first and last. MIT Generals Paper.
Alstott, Johanna. 2022. An experimental exploration of scalar implicature in adverbial vs. nominal quantifiers. B.A. Thesis, Harvard College. [LINK]