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]
Events:
NELS 41 @Penn: Oct. 22-24. Extended Deadline for Submissions: July 15th
April 10: MACSIM workshop @ the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
Teaching:
Fall 2010: LING 380/580: Semantics I (Syllabus) [formerly LING 553. It’s a graduate level introduction to formal semantic, and also suitable as an advanced course for undergraduates (with a good syntax background)]
Spring 2010: LING 581: Semantics II (continuation of LING 553). LING 255: Formal Semantics and Cognitive Science.
Fall 2009: LING 106: Introduction to Formal Linguistics & LING 553: Introduction to Formal Semantics. Course materials are available for registered students via Blackboard.
Some Recent Work
2010. Situation pronouns where you need them: A situation semantic account of transparent interpretations and contextual domain restriction. (Draft, 7/19/2010)
2010. Affective ‘this’. [Potts, Christopher and Florian Schwarz] Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 3(5):1-30.
2009. The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora. [Constant, Noah; Christopher Davis; Christopher Potts; and Florian Schwarz.] Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 33(1-2):5-21.
2009. Two Types of Definites in Natural Language, PhD thesis, University
of Massachusetts Amherst. (Chair: Angelika Kratzer)
2009 [to appear]. Maximize Presupposition and Two Types of Definite Competitors. [Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menendez-Benito and Florian Schwarz] In Proceedings of NELS 39, Amherst, MA: GLSA.2009 [to appear].
[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.
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. 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, pp. 139-159 [draft]
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)
