(email me for drafts)

Sociolinguistic variation and contextual linguistic expectations. Some have recently argued that marginalized speakers may suffer illocutionary injustices when trying to exploit the social significance of their language varieties. These speech-act-theoretic analyses fail. Instead, I argue that these injustices are explained in terms of unjust contextual linguistic expectations.

The problem of dialect continua for the ontology of languages. Dialectologists observe cases in which linguistic differences increase cumulatively as one travels from village to village in a particular direction. While adjacent villages can communicate, distant villages cannot; but there is no non-arbitrary location to place a border between languages. I propose a pluralist solution, inspired by the work of David Lewis, according to which the linguistic behavior of a single 'monolingual' speaker is a part of many overlapping linguistic conventions.

Taxonomizing socially meaningful linguistic content. Some expressions, like slang, jargon, and sociolinguistic variants, carry social meaning and play socially-important functions in discourse. By analogy with honorifics, one might think these expressions conventionally encode secondary, use-conditional contents. They do not encode secondary, use-conditional contents, but not for the reasons that have been recently proposed in the literature. 

Other Projects

A paper defending Lewisian Conventionalism against the objection that it cannot explain socially-motivated changes to linguistic conventions.

A paper arguing against recently proposed Semantic Expressivist theories of metalinguistic negotiation.

A paper on the semantics, pragmatics, and dynamics of counterfactual conditionals in discourse context.