I have been spending my intellectual life studying how meaning takes shape in human language. A common thread in my work is the idea/claim/speculation that a logic (a way of drawing inferences) spontaneously grows and latches on to the syntactic structures produced by our capacity for recursive computation. This ‘natural logic’ gives a special power to our ability to use language to communicate and refer, a power not found in other species.

Some more specific recurring themes/obsessions are properties and predication (control/raising/de se attributions), Noun Phrase structure (quantified vs. ‘bare’ nominals, mass vs. count), anaphora and presuppositions, implicatures and polarity phenomena. I am also very interested in pursuing these topics by experimental means.

 

Logic in Grammar
Oxford University Press
2013

Semantica, Le Strutture del Linguaggio
Il Mulino

1997

Semantic Interfaces
CSLI
2001

Dynamics of Meaning. Anaphora, Presupposition and the Theory of Grammar
University of Chicago Press
1995

Meaning and Grammar An Introduction to Semantics
MIT Press

2000

Properties, Types and Meaning
Kluwer/Reidel

1988