I'm a fourth-year specializing in formal and experimetnal semantics. 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).
Manuscripts
Alstott, Johanna and Athulya Aravind. Under review. On aspectual coercion in before-/after-clauses: Evidence from processing. [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna and Athulya Aravind. Under review. Assessing the evidence for presupposition triggering in artificial word learning paradigms. [LINK]
Journal articles
Alstott, Johanna. 2025. First and last as superlatives of before and after. Natural Language Semantics 33(1). [LINK]
Conference proceedings
Alstott, Johanna. in prep. Next. In Proceedings of the 62nd annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 62).
Alstott, Johanna. 2025. On aspectual coercion in before-clauses: Evidence from processing. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 35, 144–163. [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna. 2025. On very-intensified superlatives. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29, 30–46. [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna. 2024. Scalar implicature in adverbial and nominal quantifiers: Two experiments. In Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 59), 13–24. [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna. 2024. A first semantics for at first and at last. In Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9(1). [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna. 2023. Ordinal numbers: Not superlatives, but modifiers of superlatives. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 33, 1-20. [LINK]
Alstott, Johanna & 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]