I am interested in phenomena that have been labeled as involving “coercion” and the precise psychological mechanisms that underlie coercion-like interpretations and the observed processing cost. With Maria Piñango, I have been developing formal semantic analyses of measure adverbs like for an hour and aspectual verbs like begin, finish that can be reconciled in a precise way with psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic observations. This collaboration has also led us to begin exploring how to probe into the cognitive and neural mechanisms that are responsible for semantic change.
Variability in ser-estar use across five Spanish dialects: An experimental investigation. (with Maria Piñango and Sara Sanchez-Alonso). (submitted)
Operationalizing the role of Context in Language Variation (with Martin Fuchs and Maria Piñango). In Gamerschlag, Thomas; Kalenscher, Tobias; Löbner, Sebastian; Schrenk, Markus, and Zeevat, Henk (eds.). Selected Papers from Cognitive Structures 16. Language, Cognition, and Mind Series. Springer. (to appear)
The Progressive-to-Imperfective shift: contextually determined variation in Rioplatense, Iberian, and Mexican Altiplano Spanish (with Martin Fuchs and Maria Piñango) In Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. Johns Benjamins. (in press)
Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-Paced Reading and fMRI. (with Yao-ying Lai, Cheryl Lacadie, Todd Constable, and Maria Piñango). In Yoad Winter and James Hampton (eds.) Concept Composition and Experimental Semantics/Pragmatics, 191-222. New York: Springer. (2017)
Reanalyzing the complement coercion effect through a generalized lexical semantics for aspectual verbs(with Maria Piñango). Journal of Semantics 33.2 359-408 (2016)
Complement coercion as the processing of aspectual verbs: Evidence from Self-Paced Reading and fMRI. With Yao-ying Lai, Cheryl Lacadie, Todd Constable, and Maria Piñango. In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Meeting 2014.
Complement coercion: Distiguishing between type-shifting and pragmatic inferencing. (with Argyro Katsika, David Braze, and Maria Piñango). In The Mental Lexicon 7.1, pp 58–76
Quantification and context in measure adverbs (with Maria Piñango). In Proceedings of SALT 21, pp. 295–312.