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Clause chaining, switch reference and coordination
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
In this thesis I ponder over a constellation of phenomena that revolve around switch reference and coordination, drawing mainly on their instantiation in Kisedje (Je, Brazil). I start by investigating Klsedje's case system. ...
Joint practical deliberation
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do. In this dissertation, I argue that several speech acts that we can use to alter our moral obligations - promises, offers, requests, demands, ...
Persons, imposters, and monsters
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
This dissertation is about person features, their representation and interpretation in natural language. I will argue that there are several ways in which person features can be represented and interpreted. Most importantly, ...
Epistemic stability
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
I argue that knowledge and rational belief are subject to stability conditions. A belief that amounts to knowledge couldn't easily have been lost due to the impact of misleading evidence. A belief that is rational couldn't ...
Interpreting questions under attitudes
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015)
Abstract This dissertation concerns three kinds of variability that pose challenges for the compositional semantics of question-embedding sentences: (i) lexical variation among clause-embedding predicates with respect to ...
The role of Question-Answer Congruence (QAC) in child language and adult sentence processing
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
This dissertation investigates experimentally the role of Question-Answer Congruence (QAC, von Stechow 1990, Rooth 1985, 1992) in child language acquisition and adult sentence processing. Specifically, I present two case ...
Doing your best (while making do with less) : the actual value conception of instrumental rationality
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
In this thesis, I sketch a decision-theoretic picture of instrumental rationality, which I call the Actual Value Conception: roughly, that you should align your preferences over your options to your best estimates of how ...
Action-first attitudes
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
In this thesis, I present an action-first theory of knowledge and belief. We have a mutual interest in the successful action of our peers, and the significance of belief and knowledge stems from their role in promoting ...
Perceptual sources for closed-syllable vowel laxing and derived environment effects
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
This dissertation claims that allowing perceptual factors to play a role in phonology helps make some progress on the understanding of two challenging phenomena: closed-syllable vowel laxing (CSVL), i.e. the tendency for ...
The secret life of pronouns
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
This thesis explores the relationship between anaphora and movement on a wide array of data primarily from Russian. I argue that anaphors and pronominals are underlyingly the same syntactic entity, an index, whereas ...