Professor Emerita of Linguistics
The Ohio State University

Visiting Professor, NYU Linguistics

Affiliate, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science

My main areas of specialization within linguistics are formal semantics and pragmatics. 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, perspective, and domain restriction
• The semantics and pragmatics of modality, mood, tense, and aspect

I've been collaborating with David Beaver, Mandy Simons, and Judith Tonhauser since 2006 on projects that pertain to projective meaning: presupposition, conventional implicature, and other non-assertoric aspects of utterance meaning. We currently have a collaborative grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (2015-2018): "What's the question? A cross-linguistic investigation into compositional and pragmatic constraints on the question under discussion".

My colleague at OSU Philosophy, Stewart Shapiro, and I have a long-term project on natural language metaphysics. We're currently working on papers on the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic modal statements, and on Waismann's notion of open-texture in meaning. We have just completed editing a special issue of Linguistics and Philosophy on the semantics of cardinals (volume 40.4, to appear later this year) with papers by Jefferson Barlew, Brendan Balcerak-Jackson & Dolores Pinka, Fredericke Moltmann, and Eric Snyder.

Up-coming talks:

• September 18-20, 2017: short course on anaphora in discourse, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• September 21-22, 2nd Colloquium on Referential Semantics, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• October 20, 2017: Rutgers University Linguistics Department colloquium.
• November 14-16, 2017: LENS 14, Tokyo, Japan.

I'm an Associate Editor of the journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and a member of the editorial board of Semantics and Pragmatics.

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