I am a linguist, specialized in semantic theory and fieldwork. I study how meanings are expressed within and across languages, and what this reveals about language in general.
My recent work has mostly been on Ecuadorian Siona, French, Spanish, Turkish.
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I previously was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin, as part of the LeibnizDream project.
I received my PhD from New York University in 2021 with a dissertation on Neg-raising Modals and Scaleless Implicatures.
Research areas
~ semantics & pragmatics ~ interfaces with syntax ~
Topics
main
~ implicature ~ alternatives ~ negation ~ modality ~ negative concord ~
side
~ polarity ~ scope ~ semantics of differential objects ~ questions & discourse structure ~
~ natural language understanding in large language models ~
Methodologies and Approaches
main
~ theory ~ fieldwork ~ typology ~
side
~ experimental ~ child language ~ corpus ~ computational ~
PAPERS
Upcoming publications
- under review. (with Itai Bassi, Aurore Gonzalez, Marie-Christine Meyer, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Uli Sauerland) Core Concepts and Indirect Alternatives: On the Anti-Duality of Quantifiers. [paper]
- under review. Is negation negative? (in a strict negative concord SOV language) [email me for a draft]
Recent publications
- 2023. (with Aurore Gonzalez, Chiara Dal Farra, Johannes Hein) Presupposition projection from the scope of ‘say’. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27 [paper]
- 2023. (with Uli Sauerland, Itai Bassi, Cory Bill, Abigail Bimpeh, Aron Hirsch, Marie-Christine Meyer, Andreea Nicolae, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Artemis Alexiadou) An Algebra of Thought that Predicts Key Aspects of Language Structure. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27 [paper]
- 2023. (with Imke Driemel, Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić, Astrid van Alem) Negative concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English child language. Languages [paper]
- 2023. (with Gary Thoms) Negation, modals and head movement: a reassessment. Glossa [paper]
- 2023. (with Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić) Negative concord in the acquisition of English and German: Some results from a corpus study. Proceedings of CLS 58 [paper]
- 2022. Neg-raising with belief predicates as a scaleless implicature. Proceedings of SALT 32 [paper]
- 2022. (with Omar Agha) Weak necessity modals as homogeneous pluralities of worlds. Proceedings of SALT 32 [paper]
- 2022. (with Deniz Özyıldız) Why neg-raising requires stativity. Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium [paper]
- 2022. Exceptionally Optional Negative Concord with Turkish neither..nor. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory [paper]
- 2021. Scaleless implicatures, blocked by Actuality Entailments. Proceedings of SuB 25 [paper]
- 2021. Modal strengthening in Ecuadorian Siona and the typology of scaleless implicatures. Proceedings of SULA 11 [paper]
- 2021. (with Justin Case) The interaction of number and information structure in Siona DOM. Proceedings of SULA 11 [paper]
- 2020. {Paloma Jeretič, Alex Warstadt}, Suvrat Bhooshan, Adina Williams. Are Natural Language Inference Models IMPPRESsive? Learning IMPlicature and PRESupposition. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). [paper]
- 2019. {Alex Warstadt, Yu Cao, Ioana Grosu, Wei Peng, Hagen Blix, Yining Nie, Anna Alsop, Shikha Bordia, Haokun Liu, Alicia Parrish, Sheng-Fu Wang, Jason Phang, Anhad Mohananey, Phu Mon Htut, Paloma Jeretič}, and Samuel R. Bowman. Investigating BERT’s Knowledge of Language: Five Analysis Methods with NPIs. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) [paper]
- 2018. Structured Questions. Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 36 [paper]
- 2018. Hybrid and Optional Negative Concord in Turkish: A unified analysis. Proceedings of Tu+2, IULC Working Papers, 18(2)
Manuscripts
INVITED TALKS
- 2023. Is negation negative? (in Turkish) 8th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+8), Harvard University
- 2023. Modals derived from possession: a type-flexibility account. Meaning in Linguistics Talks, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf
- 2022. Panelist on homogeneity projection and relation to other gappy phenomena at the 1st Homogeneity & Non-Maximality Workshop
- 2022. Force and flavor of derived modals: Lessons from an existential construction in Ecuadorian Siona. Interdisciplinary Colloquium series, Tel-Aviv University
- 2022. Force and flavor of derived modals: Lessons from an existential construction in Ecuadorian Siona. Oberseminar, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
- 2022. Force and flavor of derived modals: Lessons from an existential construction in Ecuadorian Siona. SULA 12, University of Ottawa
- 2022. Modality derived from possession: The view from Ecuadorian Siona and an extended typology. Triple AFLA (TripleA 9 & AFLA 29), University of Manchester
- 2021. Neg-raising modals and Scaleless Implicatures. MECORE Kickoff Workshop, University of Edinburgh/University of Konstanz [slides]
- 2020. Scaleless items and scalar reasoning. Meaning and Grammar Research Group, University of Edinburgh
- 2020. Scalelessness in grammar. SURGE (“semantics U-name-it at Rutgers”), Rutgers University
- 2019. The processing cost of weak modals and consequences for child production and typology. Meaning & Modality Lab, Harvard University [slides]
PRESENTATIONS
- 2023.
- Perfective disrupts neg-raising. (with Deniz Özyıldız) NELS 53, University of Göttingen [handout]
- 2022.
- Why neg-raising requires stativity. (with Deniz Özyıldız) Amsterdam Colloquium 2022, University of Amsterdam
- Negative concord in Dutch, English and German child language. (with Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Aurore Gonzalez, Astrid von Alem, Ivona Ilić) Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW) 36, Chicago University
- Presupposition projection from the scope of ‘say’. (with Aurore Gonzalez, Chiara Dal Farra, Johannes Hein) Sinn und Bedeutung 27, Charles University Prague [slides]
- Do child languages have negative concord? A corpus study. (with Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić) Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 15, Goethe University Frankfurt [poster]
- Neg-raising with think as a scaleless implicature. SALT 32, El Colegio de México [slides & presentation]
- Weak Necessity Modals as homogeneous definite plurals. (with Omar Agha) SALT 32, El Colegio de México [handout]
- Negative Concord in the Acquisition of Non-Negative Concord Languages. (with Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Imke Driemel, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić, Maria Teresa Guasti) CLS 58, University of Chicago
- 2021.
- Neg-raising modals and scaleless implicatures. ZAS talk series [slides]
- Rigidity under focus in Ecuadorian Siona DOM. (with Justin Case) AMAZONICAS 2020
- Modal strengthening in Ecuadorian Siona. AMAZONICAS 2020
- Acquiring negated modals in French and Spanish: a corpus study. Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America 2020 [abstract]
- 2020.
- Scaleless implicatures, blocked by Actuality Entailments. Sensus 2020 [handout]
- Scaleless implicatures, blocked by Actuality Entailments. SuB 25 [handout & presentation]
- Modal strengthening in Ecuadorian Siona. (with Justin Case) SuB 25, Workshop on Semantics of Understudied Languages and Semantic Fieldwork [slides & presentation]
- Modal strengthening in Ecuadorian Siona and the typology of scaleless implicatures. SULA 11 [slides & presentation]
- The interaction of number and information structure in Siona DOM. (with Justin Case) SULA 11 [slides & presentation]
- Are Natural Language Inference Models IMPPRESsive? Learning IMPlicature and PRESupposition. (with Alex Warstadt, Suvrat Bhooshan, and Adina Williams) ACL 2020 [slides, ACL page]
- Strengthening ‘must not’, blocked by Actuality Entailments. GLOW 43 [poster & presentation]
- Modal strengthening in Ecuadorian Siona and the typology of scaleless implicatures. GLOW 43 Semantics Workshop [slides & presentation]
- 2019.
- Negated modals and scaleless implicatures. NYU Semantics Group
- Investigating BERT’s Knowledge of Grammar: Five Analysis Methods with NPIs. EMNLP 2019 [slides by Alex Warstadt]
- A mismatch between semantic scope and morpheme order in Turkish. WAFL 15, Moscow [unable to attend, see abstract]
- The Siona tripartite DOM System. (with Justin Case) GLOW 42, Oslo [unable to attend, see abstract]
- The role of intersubjectivity in ordering the left periphery (poster). (with Maxime Tulling) LSA 2019 Annual Meeting, New York [poster]
- 2018.
- 2017.
- Exhaustivity in Turkish Alternative Questions (poster). 3rd workshop on Turkish, Turkic and the Languages of Turkey (Tu+3), UCLA
- Optional negative concord with Turkish neither..nor. ESSLLI 2017 Student Session, Toulouse
- Ne..ne phrases in Turkish: A new piece of the negative concord puzzle (poster). WAFL 13, Tokyo
- Shughni deixis: Merging social and spatial dimensions. NACIL 1, Stony Brook University
- 2016.
- Ne..ne phrases in Turkish: A problem for Zeijlstra’s negative concord. 2nd workshop on Turkish, Turkic and the Languages of Turkey (Tu+2), University of Bloomington, Indiana
- Case and aspect in sentence-initial depictives in Russian. 11th Slavic Linguistics Society, University of Toronto
- 2015.
- Toward a unified semantics of Russian imperfective. SYNC 2015, New York University