Course at ESSLLI 2025. In order to teach the course "Dogwhistles at the intersection of semantics, pragmatics, and social meaning", I have updated our recent book, fixing a large amount of errata (oops!). I additionally have here course notes, which form a bulleted outline of chapters 2-8. It could be …
Presented at SALT 2025. There are a large number of small sign languages throughout Maya-speaking regions of Mesoamerica due to high rates of congenital deafness in various Maya communities (Le Guen 2019). These communities have only been studied from an anthropological perspective, with no formal description of the grammatical properties …
Presented at SAIL 2025. Yuman languages have complex verbal number marking (ex., plurality). Langdon (1992) has described number marking in Yuman as "maddeningly irregular and complex" and "impossible to predict" (406-407). The issue is that the morphological inventory of number comprises numerous exponents. Furthermore, one exponent can be associated with …
Presented at UCLA's SLIME 3. We describe the MesoSign project, which aims to document sign language(s) used in Highland Maya communities. By hypothesis, as shared sign languages, they have emerged in contact with the gesture systems of hearing speakers of Mayan languages, like Kaqchikel. We present the first fruits …
Proceedings of SALT 34. Hualapai is a Yuman language with a verbal morphological system, seen in various languages of the region, which poses difficulties for a compositional analysis. In particular, Hualapai verb morphology exhibits incrementality (see Baerman 2016, 2019, 2024), where there is no one-to-one mapping between forms and meanings …
Presented at COLANG 2024. Linguistic heritage includes not only the spoken languages used by hearing communities, but also the sign languages used by Deaf communities. While large national sign languages (ASL, LSF, etc.) have grammars, dictionaries, pedagogical materials and teaching traditions, smaller sign languages---and Indigenous sign languages in particular---are under-resourced …
Languagre. doi: (to appear). With Ryan Bennett and Meg Harvey Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological: it is sensitive to foot structure, morphology, and certain phonotactics; and occurs …
With Jérémy Pasquereau and John W.W. Powell Presented at the Workshop on Mesoamerican Languages, WCCFL 29, and Sinn und Bedeutung 26 Piipaash (Yuman) has what, at first pass, look like standard dependent definites (e.g., Balusu 2006;Farkas 1997; Henderson 2014). Looking more broadly we see that the dependent …
With Ryan Bennett and Meg Harvey In Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces, edited by Haruo Kubozono, Junko Ito, and Armin Mester. Uspanteko (Mayan) is unique among the languages of Guatemala in having a full-fledged system of lexical tone. Tone is thoroughly integrated into the morphology of the language, and triggers several …
With Ryan Bennett, Megan Harvey, and Tomás Alberto Méndez López accepted at Language and Linguistic Compass. Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken by up to 6000 people in the Guatemalan highlands. We provide an overview of the phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko, focusing on phenomena which are common in …
With Ryan Bennett, Megan Harvey, and Tomás Alberto Méndez López accepted at Tlalocan. Uspanteko is one of the smallest and most threatened Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. While Uspanteko belongs to the K'ichean branch of the Mayan family, it bears a striking number of linguistic features not seen in its …
With Elin McCready Proceedings of Probability and Meaning Conference, Gothenburg 2020. Henderson and McCready 2017, 2018, 2019 build a novel theory of so-called 'dogwhistle' communication by extending the social meaning games of Burnett 2017. This work reports on an ongoing project to build systems to model the evolution of dogwhistle …
With Elin McCready Proceedings of Probability and Meaning Conference, Gothenburg 2020. Judgements about communicative agents evolve over the course of interactions both in how individuals are judged for testimonial reliability and for (ideological) trustworthiness. This paper combines a theory of social meaning and persona with a theory of reliability within …
With Jian Gang Ngui CLS 56. We discuss the effect of the SE sentence-final discourse particlel lo, which can be used to "agree to disagree" (Farkas & Bruce 2010), but also for a variety of other discourse effects. We propose aunified account of these effects, which will show that "agreeing to …
Chapter for Handbook of North American Languages. Verbs are the canonical way that languages allow speakers to talk about events, but events are slippery things. Imagine how hard it would be, for instance, to watch a short video of an action scene and try to decide how many distinct events …
With Elin McCready Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium 2019. Given that someone is consistently untruthful, why should we ever trust them? The question is not academic. Consider politicians and others who are known to consistently lie, but who are still voted back into office. This talk addresses this puzzle via …
Invited presentation at the 2017 DGfS workshop on secondary information. Then appeared as a chapter in 2019 in the volume Secondary Content. With Elin McCready A dogwhistle is language that sends one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message …
Semantics & Pragmatics. doi: 10.3765/sp.12.1. With Lucas Champollion and Dylan Bumford. Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of non-maximality in plural definites by Kriz (2016) to explain how hearers use Questions under Discussion …
Language. doi: 10.1353/lan.2019.0014 With Daniel Gutzmann. This paper investigates a novel use of much in a construction that has not yet been recognized in the literature---Angry, much?---which we dub "expressive much". Our primary proposal is that expressive much is a shunting operator in the sense …
Glossa. doi: 10.5334/gjgl.515 In addition to roots for familiar classes like verb, noun, and adjective, Mayan languages have a class of roots traditionally called ``positional''. Positional roots are distinct from other roots most prominently in terms of requiring derivation into stems of one of the more familiar …
LENLS 14. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-93794-6_16 With E. McCready. The paper focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of dog-whistles, namely expressions that send one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message to an ingroup. There are three questions that …
Linguistic Inquiry. doi. 10.1162/LING_a_00272 With Ryan Bennett and Boris Harizanov. This paper deals with a so-far unnoticed phenomenon in prosodic phonology, which we dub prosodic smothering. Prosodic smothering arises when the prosodic status of a clitic or affix varies with the presence or absence of some outer morpheme …
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. doi: 10.1007/s11049-016-9334-z. This paper presents cross-domain evidence that natural language makes use of two types of group entities that differ in terms of how they cohere. The first kind of groups, which I call swarms, are defined in terms of the spatial and temporal …
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. doi: 10.1007/s11049-017-9370-3 With Jessica Coon In many languages with ergative morphology, transitive subjects (i.e.ergatives) are unable to undergo A'-extraction. This extraction asymmetry is a common hallmark of "syntactic ergativity", and is found in a range of typologically diverse languages (see e …
SALT 26. doi: 10.3765/salt.v26i0.3786, and as an invited talk at LENLS 2015. This paper develops a novel formal semantics for ideophones that can account for their meaning and compositional properties. The proposal extends recent work on iconicity in sign languages by Davidson (2015), whose demonstration-based framework …
Language and Linguistics Compass. 10(10), 551-588. 10.1111/lnc3.12187 This article has two interlocked goals. The first is to highlight the strands of research that have played an important role in shaping our understanding of Mayan language semantics. The second is to acquaint non-Mayanists, and especially semanticists, with …
Chapter in a Routledge volume entitle Mayan Languages Pluractionality is a category that has not been traditionally talked about in grammars of Mayan languages. The goal of this chapter is to get a broad view of pluractionality in Mayan by presenting a series of pluractionals from two languages, Kaqchikel and …
Semantics & Pragmatics. doi: 10.3765/sp.7.6 This paper presents an analysis of a new scope puzzle that arises through the interaction of two lesser-studied constructions, dependent indefinites and verbal pluractionality. The result is a novel account of dependent indefinites that correctly predicts their grammaticality with pluractionals by recognizing …
Language Documentation & Conservation. vol 8, pp. 75-91. With Brent Henderson and Peter Rohloff. Existing models for language revitalization focus almost exclusively on language learning and use. While recognizing the value of these models, we argue that their effective application is largely limited to situations in which languages have low numbers …
Semantics and Linguistic Theory 23. doi: 10.3765/salt This paper provides a new analysis of N-BY-N adverbials that captures their previously unrecognized close connection to verbs of scalar change. After providing a series of arguments that N-BY-N modification requires the VP to provide a scalar interval it can measure …
Journal of Semantics. doi: 10.1093/jos/fft014. With Scott AnderBois and Adrian Brasoveanu. Potts (2005) and many subsequent works have argued that the semantic content of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, e.g., the underlined material in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited her in the …
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. doi: 10.1007/s11049-013-9196-6. With Ryan Bennett Uspanteko (Guatemala; ~2000 speakers) is an endangered K'ichean-branch Mayan language. It is unique among the K'ichean languages in that, along with obligatory right-edge stress, Uspanteko has innovated a system of contrastive pitch accent. Word-level accent in Uspanteko is …
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. doi: 10.1007/s11049-012-9170-8 This article develops an analysis of a pair of morphological alternations in K'ichee' (Mayan) that are conditioned at the right edge of intonational phrase boundaries. I propose a syntax-prosody mapping algorithm that derives intonational phrase boundaries from the surface syntax, and …
Sinn und Bedeutung 16. With Scott AnderBois and Adrian Brasoveanu Most investigations of quantifier scope are concerned with the range of possible scopes for sentences with multiple quantifiers. Instead, this study examines the actual scopes, i.e., the pragmatics of quantifier scope disambiguation. The three main findings of our investigation …
In "Representing Language: Essays in Honor of Judith Aissen". With Jessica Coon This paper examines binding puzzles in two Mayan languages and proposes an analysis which unifies two otherwise different-looking constructions: the Chol applicative and the K'ichee' agent focus (AF). In both the Chol applicative and the K'ichee' AF, subjects …
West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 28. Based on the previously unnoticed contrast between standard counterfactuals and the non-canonical counterfactual construction "if not for P, Q" (hereafter NC, for `Not' Counterfactuals), this paper argues for the emerging proposal that two distinct routes to counterfactuality are available in natural language (see …
Semantics and Linguistic Theory 19. doi: 10.3765/salt.v19i0.2538. With Adrian Brasoveanu The main goal of the paper is to argue that distributive quantificational dependencies in natural language can be established in two different ways: (i) by encapsulating quantification into functions storing quantificational dependencies as a whole, needed …