Professional interests and current projects

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My broad interests lie in the area of meaning (semantics), and its relation to form (morphology and syntax) and use (pragmatics). I find crosslinguistic variation in meaning and form extremely fascinating-- and instrumental-- in understanding how language works, and I explore the grammar of Greek in my study of this variation. Other languages that I have studied include Spanish and Catalan, Dutch, and recently, in joint work, Chinese, Basque, and Korean. Finally, I am also interested in the foundations of semantics and philosophy of language (mainly questions regarding truth, belief, and context sensitivity).

I would group the phenomena I have studied in four main subject areas: (a) polarity, (b) quantification, quantifier structure and indefinites, (c) tense/modality, and (d) focus particles (in particular EVEN) . In earlier papers, I have also studied Greek ellipsis, and clitics. Newer interests include metalinguistic comparatives, ability modals, the future, bilingualism, home-sign, and historical study of Greek negation and mood. Specific topics include the following.

1. Negation, polarity (negative polarity, negative concord, free choice);

2. Narrow scope indefinites, referential vagueness;

3. Quantification and noun phrase structure, specificity, clitics;

4. Tense, aspect, temporal connectives, the perfect, genericity;

5. Dependent tense and mood; mood selection

6. Focus and topicalization, focus particles, focus and scalarity;

7. Ellipsis (DP internal ellipsis, sluicing);

8. Wh-structures (questions, free relative clauses, pseudoclefts)

9. Metalinguistic comparatives in Greek and Korean

10. Context sensitivity of quantifiers; domain dependence versus specificity

11. Sentence building in home sign systems; sign languages

Currently, I am working on the following projects:

· The internal structure (syntax and semantics) of the quantifier phrase, with emphasis on context dependence and specificity.

· Sign language and home sign systems. Since June 2006, I have been collaborating with Susan Goldin-Meadow and Carolyn Mylander (Dept. of Psychology, University of Chicago) in grant NIH R01 DC00491 “Spontaneous Sign Systems in Five Cultures.” This project investigates home sign systems (developed by severely deaf children in the absence of any language input), and reveals the language defining properties of these systems. We have studied negation, wh-forms (paper in Congintion 2011), and in more recent work action verbs and verbs of motion.

· Metalinguistic comparatives. This is work that started in 2007, with a collaboration with Melita Stavrou (University of Thessaloniki) and expanded to include Korean (with Suwon Yoon). The parallel between Korean and Greek metalinguistic comparatives is striking.

· Referentially vague indefinites as anti-specificity markers, and how they are different from free choice items. This is joint work with Josep Quer, as well as Suwon Yoon (on the Greek/Korean extension), and Despoina Papadopoulou and Melita Stavrou on the experimental component which looks at Greek indefinites . Part of this work also critically assesses the Hamblin move for indefinites.

· The analysis of the Greek future particle 'tha'. I propose that it is a necessity epistemic modal with evidential uses.

· Rescuing of NPIs and the role of pragmatic reasoning. This is recent work with Ming Xiang and Julian Grove, and reveals a correlation between pragmatic processing and NPI-interference licensing.

· Bilingualism, literacy, and education policies. A seminar is scheduled for Spring 2012.