I am a member of the faculty of the Linguistics department at UPenn. My main interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language. I also do psycholinguistic research, especially on semantic and pragmatic processing.
[read more about my interests]
Teaching:
Fall 2009: LING 106: Introduction to Formal Linguistics & LING 553: Introduction to Formal Semantics. Course materials are available for registered students via Blackboard.
Spring 2010: LING 581: Semantics II (continuation of LING 553). LING 255: Formal Semantics and Cognitive Science.
Some Recent Work
2009. Two Types of Definites in Natural Language, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst. (Chair: Angelika Kratzer)
2009 [to appear]. The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora. [Noah Constant, Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts, and Florian Schwarz]. To appear in Sprache und Datenverarbeitung.
2009 [to appear]. Maximize Presupposition and Two Types of Definite Competitors. [Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menendez-Benito and Florian Schwarz] In Proceedigs of NELS 39, Amherst, MA: GLSA.
2009 [to appear]. Strengthening ‘or’: Effects of Focus and Downward Entailing Contexts on Scalar Implicatures. [Florian Schwarz, Charles Clifton, Jr. and Lyn Frazier] In: Anderssen, Moulton, Schwarz & Ussery (eds.) UMOP 37: Semantic Processing. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
2008. Exclamatives and heightened emotion: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora. [Chris Potts and Florian Schwarz] Manuscript.
2008. Two Types of Bridging with Two Types of Definites.
- Job talk at the University of Pennsylvania, February 14th 2008.
- Linguistics Colloquium (job talk) at Stanford University, February 26th 2008.
2007. Processing Presupposed Content. Journal of Semantics 24(4): 373-416; doi: 10.1093/jos/ffm011 [Full paper freely available from Journal website if you click here]
2007. Ex-situ focus in Kikuyu. To appear in Aboh, Hartmann & Zimmermann (eds.) Focus Strategies in African Languages: The Interaction of Focus and Grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic. Berlin: de Gruyter. [draft]
2006. A morphological distinction between bound and free definites. Poster presented at the OSU workshop on Presupposition Accommodation (original in Powerpoint, Handout version (pdf)).
2006. On NEEDING propositions and LOOKING FOR properties. In: M. Gibson, J. Howell (eds), SALT XVI 259-276, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. (Click here for online version of Proceedings from SALT XVI)
2006. Generality of Effects in item analyses. Manuscript (pdf)
[Sketch of an idea that I contributed to the discussion of the interpretation of F2 in psycholinguistics in connection with a paper by Kenneth Forster]
