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My dissertation asks whether there is a human right to democracy. This is a difficult question, not least because there is no consensus about either what democracy requires or how to interpret human rights. The introduction ...

This thesis consists of three interconnected papers on apriority, modality, and conditionals. In "Playground Conditionals," I look at three philosophical debates, each of which turns on the epistemic status of a certain ...

The main goal of this dissertation is to determine the best theory of de re/de dicto intensionality. Recently, it has become apparent that the traditional scope theory of this phenomenon is inadequate, the most marked ...

In this thesis I examine some of the fundamental questions surrounding inversion structures. I first provide an analysis of Locative Inversion. I show that the mixed A- and A- syntactic behavior of the fronted PP in English ...

In this dissertation, I investigate the grammatical effects of focus and the inseparable phenomenon of givenness. As Schwarzschild (1999) has proposed, a proper understanding of givenness eliminates the need for a separate ...

The issue of non-configurationality is fundamental in determining the possible range of variation in Universal Grammar. This dissertation investigates this issue in the context of Warlpiri, the prototypical non-configurational ...

I argue that definite descriptions, pronouns and proper names share one common syntax and semantics, basically that of definite descriptions. E-type pronouns are argued to be definite articles that take NP complements ...

My thesis consists of three papers on truth and explanations in science. Broadly, the question I ask is semantic. Should the best account of certain bits of our scientific practice focus on the concept of truth? More ...

This dissertation presents three studies based on the hypothesis that the domain of entities on which natural language interpretation relies includes a partially ordered sub-domain of events. In this sub-domain, we can ...

(cont.) Chapter 4 turns to microvariation within the (dis)harmony system of a single language, examining transparency variation in Hungarian front vowels, and distance-based variation in Hungarian neutral vowel sequences, ...