This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions,'contrastive'
statives and an 'affirmation/negation'construction involving and not, where presuppositions …

This dissertation develops a theory of contrastive topics (CTs)—what they mean, and how
they are realized. I give a compositional semantics for CT constructions, built on the idea that …

This thesis asks: what is the division of labour between the syntax and the semantics? The
empirical focus is on the phenomenon of clausal embedding, whereby the grammar …

In many languages, the same particles that form quantifier words also serve as connectives,
additive and scalar particles, question markers, roots of existential verbs, and so on. Do …

I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking
scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves …

I motivate a new theory of exceptional scope phenomena in natural language—that is, the
ability of some expressions to affect the interpretation of others from inside scope islands. I …

This dissertation concerns three kinds of variability that pose challenges for the
compositional semantics of question-embedding sentences:(i) lexical variation among …

In the past decades of research, questions have become a very prominent topic at the
semantics-pragmatics interface. Certainly, they are a natural and challenging topic for any …

This dissertation investigates a variety of issues on question semantics, especially the
interpretations of mention-some questions, multiple-wh questions, and questions with …

There is a prominent line of work in natural language semantics, rooted in the work of
Hamblin, in which the meaning of a sentence is not taken to be a single proposition, but …