I'm a second-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, and adverbials expressing temporal order (before- and after-clauses, at first/at last).
Publications
Alstott, Johanna. (forthcoming). A first semantics for at first and at last. To appear in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9(1).
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. 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
Alstott, Johanna. 2022. An experimental exploration of scalar implicature in adverbial vs. nominal quantifiers. B.A. Thesis, Harvard College. [LINK]