Judith Tonhauser

Last updated
Judith Tonhauser
EducationPh.D in Linguistics
EmployerUniversity of Stuttgart
Known forwork on Paraguayan Guaraní, cross-linguistic variation in semantics/pragmatics, nominal tense and anaphora presupposition projection

Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics and Vice Rector for Early Career Researchers and Diversity at the University of Stuttgart. [1]

Contents

Education and career

Tonhauser received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2006. Her dissertation was titled The Temporal Semantics of Noun Phrases: Evidence from Guaraní. [2] From 2006 to 2020, she was on the faculty of the Linguistics department at The Ohio State University. Since 2020 she has been Professor and Chair of English Linguistics and since 2024 a Vice Rector at the University of Stuttgart. [3]

Tonhauser's research interests include Presupposition projection, Prosody and Meaning, Temporal Anaphora and Reference, and empirical methods in Semantics and Pragmatics. She is known for her work in theoretical semantics and pragmatics, specifically on cross-linguistic semantic/pragmatic variation. To this end, she has investigated languages which are under-represented in linguistic theory like the Paraguayan Guarani language, a Tupí Guaraní language spoken in Paraguay and surrounding countries. [4]

Awards and distinctions

Tonhauser is the recipient of the 2016 Early Career Award from the Linguistic Society of America. [5] [6] The award recognizes scholars early in their career who have made outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics.

Tonhauser's 2013 paper, "Toward a taxonomy of projective content," coauthored with David Beaver, Craige Roberts, and Mandy Simons, won the 2013 Best Paper in Language (journal) Award from the Linguistic Society of America. [7]

In 2013, she was awarded an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars for her project Content and Context in the Study of Meaning Variation. [8]

She is an Associate Editor of Semantics and Pragmatics , a journal of the Linguistic Society of America. [9]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deixis</span> Words requiring context to understand their meaning

In linguistics, deixis is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time, place, or person relative to the context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known natural languages and is closely related to anaphora, with a sometimes unclear distinction between the two. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is seen as the same as, or a subclass of, indexicality.

Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails the sentence "Pat is a cat" since one cannot be a fluffy cat without being a cat. On the other hand, this sentence does not entail "Pat chases mice" since it is possible for a cat to not chase mice.

In linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include:

Emerillon is a language belonging to the Tupi–Guarani family, one of the most heavily researched language families in Amazonia. The languages related most closely to Emerillon are Wayampípukú, Wayampí, and Jo'é.

The Guaraní language belongs to the Tupí-Guaraní branch of the Tupí linguistic family.

Lauri Juhani Karttunen was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow.

David Ian Beaver is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also directs the cognitive science program and serves as Graduate Studies Advisor of the Human Dimensions of Organizations Master's program. His work concerns the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, including, in particular, research on presupposition, anaphora, topic and focus.

Ellen F. Prince was an American linguist, known for her work in linguistic pragmatics.

Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.

Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.

Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.

Craige Roberts is an American linguist, known for her work on pragmatics and formal semantics.

Free choice is a phenomenon in natural language where a linguistic disjunction appears to receive a logical conjunctive interpretation when it interacts with a modal operator. For example, the following English sentences can be interpreted to mean that the addressee can watch a movie and that they can also play video games, depending on their preference:

  1. You can watch a movie or play video games.
  2. You can watch a movie or you can play video games.

In formal semantics and pragmatics, modal subordination is the phenomenon whereby a modal expression is interpreted relative to another modal expression to which it is not syntactically subordinate. For instance, the following example does not assert that the birds will in fact be hungry, but rather that hungry birds would be a consequence of Joan forgetting to fill the birdfeeder. This interpretation was unexpected in early theories of the syntax-semantics interface since the content concerning the birds' hunger occurs in a separate sentence from the if-clause.

  1. If Joan forgets to fill the birdfeeder, she will feel very bad. The birds will get hungry.

In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation. Craige Roberts introduced the concept of a QUD in 1996 in order to formalize conversational relevance and explain its consequences for information structure and focus marking. It has subsequently become a staple of work in semantics and pragmatics, playing a role in analyses of disparate phenomena including donkey anaphora and presupposition projection.

Amy Rose Deal is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She works in the areas of syntax, semantics and morphology, on topics including agreement, indexical shift, ergativity, the person-case constraint, the mass/count distinction, and relative clauses. She has worked extensively on the grammar of the Sahaptin language Nez Perce. Deal is Editor-in-Chief of Natural Language Semantics, a major journal in the field.

Mandy Simons is a linguist and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She researches semantics and pragmatics, in particular phenomena like presupposition and projection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane Brentari</span> American linguist

Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.

Laura J. Downing is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.

Noel Burton-Roberts is a British linguist and Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is known for work ranging over general and English linguistics: architecture of language, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and English grammar.

References

  1. ↑ "Vice Rector for Early Career Researchers and Diversity". www.uni-stuttgart.de. University of Stuttgart. Retrieved 2025-01-05.
  2. ↑ "Ph.D. Alumni | Department of Linguistics". linguistics.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2016-01-08.
  3. ↑ "Short curriculum vitae". Prof. Dr. Judith Tonhauser. Retrieved 2022-03-14.
  4. ↑ "Judith Tonhauser". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-03-14.
  5. ↑ "Announcing the winners of five LSA Awards | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2016-01-08.
  6. ↑ "Judith Tonhauser wins Early Career Award from LSA | Department of Linguistics". linguistics.stanford.edu. 6 November 2015. Retrieved 2016-01-08.
  7. ↑ "Best Paper in Language Award Announced for 2013 | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2016-01-08.
  8. ↑ "ACLS". American Council of Learned Societies. Retrieved 2016-01-08.
  9. ↑ "Editorial Team". semprag.org. Semantics and Pragmatics. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.