Research interests: semantics, syntax, syntax-semantics interface 

Most of my research to date has been in the area of intensional semantics. A significant part of this research investigates what the interaction of the different coordinate dimensions of the evaluation index - specifically, the world, time, and location coordinates - can tell us about the nature of the intensional system. The central result is that, although natural language possesses a mechanism that can manipulate worlds, times, and locations non-locally (i.e. across an arbitrary number of intervening operators), this mechanism does not treat individual coordinates as independent variables. Rather, the world, time, and location coordinates associated with a given expression must always be bound by the same antecedent, suggesting that natural language does not treat these coordinates as independent variables. Preliminary results are available [Here] and [Here].

Another line of research examines the nature of world- and time-indexing constraints (e.g. Generalization X, the Nested DP Constraint, and related phenomena). The main result of this research is that many illicit indexings can be derived from a general prohibition against transparent predicates taking opaque arguments. I argue that this constraint (which can be made to follow from particular assumptions about the ontology of individuals and its interaction with a Quinean de re mechanism) not only accounts for the known world-indexing constraints but also extends to several novel environments in which such constraints have not previously been observed. For example, transparent degree clauses, before-clauses, and relative clauses cannot host opaque arguments; de re names and pronouns cannot serve as arguments of transparent predicates; and pronominal arguments of transparent predicates cannot take opaque antecedents. Some of the details are presented in the following handout.

More broadly, I am also interested in syntactic theory and the syntax–semantics interface (LF syntax).