Dr. Tom Roberts
Dr. Tom Roberts
Assistant Professor
My research broadly concerns meaning in language: I study both the literal meaning of linguistic expressions (semantics) and the general hidden rules we use in conversation to derive non-literal meaning (pragmatics). I’m particularly interested in the space of variation in both kinds of meaning across languages: some meanings that are logically possible nevertheless seem to be rare or nonexistent in the world’s languages, which can tell us something about the invisible architecture of language in general. I approach these questions with a diverse toolkit of formal methods (logic), experiments, fieldwork, and computational models, using data from a variety of languages, including English, Dutch, Turkish, and Estonian. Some recent topics of interest include yes/no questions (Isn’t Lucy in Jamaica?/Lucy is in Jamaica, right?), parenthetical constructions (Lucy is in Jamaica, I think), negation, verbs of belief, and numerals.