Recent Work:

   

      “Presuppositions, Provisos, and Probability”.

            Semantics & Pragmatics (to appear; preprint for reference only, please cite final version).

   

      “Nouwen’s Puzzle and a Scalar Semantics for Obligations, Needs, and Requirements.”

             Semantics & Linguistic Theory 21 (to appear).

      Measurement & Modality: The Scalar Basis of Modal Semantics. Ph.D. dissertation, NYU Linguistics, 2011.

             (With slight revisions affecting sections 3.7-3.8.1, 11/17/11.)

   

Coming Soon:

   

      “How many kinds of reasoning? Inference, probability, and natural language semantics”.

            (With Noah Goodman; currently under review)

   

   

About:

I am a postdoc in Noah Goodman’s Computation & Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. I work on natural language semantics and pragmatics, with a focus on integrating research in formal semantics and pragmatics with the insights of recent Bayesian cognitive science and with probabilistic and decision-theoretic models more generally.

My two favorite topics in formal semantics are modality and gradability, and I've worked a good deal on the semantics of comparatives, vagueness, and degree modification as well as the intersection of modality and gradability (see my dissertation, linked above). In pragmatics I'm interested in presupposition, implicature, and how both of these interact with the way that people structure conversations and domain-general social reasoning abilities — in particular humans' impressive abilities to infer others' beliefs and intentions, which I believe is the key to a systematic understanding of pragmatics.

Recently I've also been working on reasoning, looking at how natural language semantics and pragmatics can inform and be informed by psychological studies in this area. I also have a longstanding interest in methodological and philosophical issues involving the interaction of language structure, use, and variation. See my publications and presentations pages for more details on all of this.

I did my Ph.D. in the Linguistics Department at NYU, under the supervision of Chris Barker. I also studied philosophy at the University of Otago and at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.

Contact:

Concatenate “dan” with my last name, then add the “at” symbol followed by “stanford”, a period, and “edu”.