Yael Sharvit

Last updated
Yael Sharvit
Alma mater Rutgers University
Scientific career
Fields Linguistics,
Institutions University of Connecticut, UCLA
Thesis  (1997)
Doctoral advisor Veneeta Dayal

Yael Sharvit is an American linguist who is Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. [1] She specializes in semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. [2]

Contents

Career

Sharvit received her PhD in linguistics from Rutgers University in 1997; she was the third person to graduate from the program. [3] Her dissertation title is "The Syntax and Semantics of Functional Relative Clauses."

She joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut in 1999, leaving in 2011 to take up a position at UCLA. [4]

Research

Sharvit is known for her work on tense, including embedded tense (Sharvit 1999), or bound tense (Alxatib & Sharvit 2017), tense in free indirect discourse (Sharvit 2008) and cross-linguistic typologies of tense. She has also contributed to the semantics of questions (Sharvit 2002) and relative clauses, the semantics of attitude verbs, negative polarity items, resumptive pronouns (Sharvit 1999) and superlatives (Sharvit & Stateva 2002). [5]

Honors and distinctions

She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Semantics . [6] She also serves as co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Linguistics and Philosophy. [7]

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.

Counterfactual conditionals are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood.

Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the antecedent, which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the consequent expressing the result.

Thomas Givon is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism", today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the University of Oregon. Givón advocates an evolutionary approach to language and communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara H. Partee</span> American linguist

Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics.

Elizabeth Cowper is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto.

In natural language, a deferred reference is the metonymic use of an expression to refer to an entity related to the conventional meaning of that expression, but not denoted by it. Several types of deferred reference have been studied in the literature.

A resumptive pronoun is a personal pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent after a pause or interruption, as in This is the girli that whenever it rains shei cries.

Veneeta Dayal is an American linguist. She is currently the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University.

Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.

Raffaella Zanuttini is an Italian linguist whose research focuses primarily on syntax and linguistic variation. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Maria Bittner is Professor Emerita in Linguistics at Rutgers University.

In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations.

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.

Helen de Hoop is a Dutch linguist and Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is known for her works on the relationship between the form and interpretation of language.

In formal semantics, subtrigging is the phenomenon whereby free choice items in episodic sentences require a modifier. For instance, the following sentence is not acceptable in English.

  1. *Any student signed the petition.

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.

Elin McCready is an American linguist and professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University. She researches semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, focusing in particular on such phenomena as evidentials, honorifics, and slurs. She is also co-director of Aoyama Gakuin University's Singularity Research Institute.

Louise McNally is a linguist and professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). She researches semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces with syntax, in particular on areas including natural semantic ontology, scales, and reference.

Ana Arregui is a linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research in formal semantics addresses phenomena including modality, tense, aspect, pronouns and indefinites.

References

  1. "Faculty: Yael Sharvit". Department of Linguistics - UCLA. Retrieved 2022-04-22.
  2. "Google Scholar citations - Yael Sharvit". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-03-14.
  3. Braver, Aaron. "Alumnx". ling.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  4. "Sharvit joins UCLA faculty". SNARL | Rutgers Linguistics. 2011-09-23. Retrieved 2024-03-09.
  5. "Yael Sharvit - Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2024-03-09.
  6. "Editorial Board". Oxford Academic. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  7. "Linguistics and Philosophy". SpringerLink. Retrieved 2024-03-09.