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Statement of Research Interests

My recent and ongoing research is focused on the interpretation of referring expressions (e.g. she, Rosa, that woman, the woman we talked about yesterday) as a window on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Referring expressions have attracted a great deal of interest in fields concerned with linguistic meaning, including semantics, psycholinguistics, and the philosophy of language, because they embody a particularly direct link between language and the world: speakers have clear intuitions that an utterance of a referring expression is connected with a particular entity in the world (its referent). But the choice of referent is often quite complex, drawing on information from lexical semantics (such as determiner meanings), compositional semantics (such as the interaction of nominals with modality) and pragmatics (such as domain restriction and the inferred intentions of the speaker). I am interested in referring expressions because when we learn something about their interpretation, we also learn something about how lexical and compositional semantics interacts with pragmatics. My research program is proceeding in three main areas, addressing the interpretation of particular referring expressions (see section 1), the connection between reference and trans-world identity (section 2), and the nature of pragmatic domain restriction (section 3). I work from the perspective of formal semantics and formal pragmatics in all three areas. In addition, the philosophy of language is important to my research on trans-world identity, and I am beginning to apply experimental methods to my research on domain restriction.