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Craige Roberts

 

Selected Publications and Manuscripts

QUD Bibliography

Curriculum Vitae

OSU Linguistics Department

portrait by Prudence Whittlesey 2013

Professor Emerita of Linguistics
The Ohio State University

Research Scholar, Barnard College

My main areas of specialization within linguistics are formal semantics and pragmatics and the dynamic interaction between semantic content and context in the course of interpretation. Within these fields, my principal research interests are:

  • Anaphora, definiteness, and specificity. Indexicals and proper names.
  • Formal models of the context of utterance and its role in interpretation: Presupposition, focus, implicature,

    I retired from the Linguistics Department at The Ohio State University in 2016, and have since resided in New York City, where I am fortunate to be a member of a lively community of researchers working on linguistic semantics and pragmatics and the philosophy of language. Thanks so much to my colleagues at Barnard College, NYU, and Rutgers University, and especially the NY Philosophy of Language Workshop, who have made me feel at home here.

    perspective, domain restriction, and dynamic pragmatics.
  • The semantics and pragmatics of modality, mood, tense, and aspect

I’ll be teaching a short course on Anaphora Resolution in Formal Pragmatics at the LSA 2023 Summer Institute at UMass/Amherst this coming July. Come join us!

Right now I'm working on several projects:

I gave the Beth Lecture at the 2022 Amsterdam Colloquium, ''The architecture of interpretation: Auxiliary content and pragmatic competence'', an extension of my earlier paper on ''Linguistic content and the architecture of interpretation'', which focused on discourse anaphora. Auxiliary content yields what Chris Potts (2005) called conventional implicatures. Setting aside Potts' multi-dimensional analysis, I argue that such phenomena provide both empirical and conceptual support for a rich, dynamic pragmatics for the update of local context, and a particular view of the nature of pragmatic competence as it bears on natural language semantics.

I've been collaborating with Mandy Simons since 2006 to study projective meaning: presupposition, conventional implicature, and other non-assertoric aspects of utterance meaning. We gave a paper on ''Preconditions, presuppositions, and projection'' at the 2022 Amsterdam Colloquium, focusing on the projective content of factive and change of state verbs, and are working on a paper for publication.

I've also been working for several years on how indexicality and doxastic perspective influence interpretation in natural languages. My paper "The Character of epistemic modality'' has been accepted by Linguistics and Philosophy. Another paper ''Character study: de se semantics for indexicals''  needs revision after review and I'll post a new version when it's ready.

I've extended the framework I proposed in my 1996 paper on Questions Under Discussion to consider the semantics and pragmatics of imperatives and directive speech acts. That paper, "Imperatives in dynamic pragmatics", has been revised and resubmitted.

I first gave ''Coherence, salience and anaphora: The role of the QUD'' as an invited lecture at the workshop on Coherence and Anaphora organized by Daniel Altshuler and Sam Cumming at NASSLLI 2016, Rutgers. It still needs work on a couple of points, but if you're interested and read it, I'd appreciate any feedback.

 I'm a member of the editorial board of Semantics and Pragmatics, and the Executive Board of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Contact Information:
Email: roberts DOT 21 AT osu.edu