Jonathan Howell

 
 

I am interested in context-sensitive meaning, and in particular the role of prosody in discourse.  My dissertation investigates the phenomenon of focus, the correlation between


  1. (i)the information in a discourse which is in some sense most important (e.g. new or contrastive); and


  1. (ii) the material in an utterance which is realized with prosodic prominence (e.g. stress, pitch accent).


Some specific research questions from my dissertation: 

  1. • Is pitch accent (or its phonetic realization) a necessary correlate of semantic focus? 

  2. • Is prosodic prominence processed syntagmatically (relative to the utterance), paradigmatically (relative to another possible prosodic realization of an utterance), or both? 

  3. • Are certain lexical items inherently or obligatorily focused, and therefore always prosodically prominent? 

  4. • Are all focus-sensitive operators propositional, or do some operators have scope (and corresponding prosodic domain) below the clause?


In other work, I have studied the role of context in modality and counterfactuality in English and French. I investigate modal uses of the French conditionnel morpheme which, in addition to its usual role in counterfactual conditionals is used to derive many other modal notions, including weak necessity, subjunctive possibility, optativity, and evidentiality.

Research Keywords


In general:

  1. • Context-dependency

  2. • Prosody

  3. • Experimental linguistics

  4. • Computational linguistics

  5. • Linguistic methodology



In particular:

  1. • Information Structure

  2. • Acoustics/production of prosodic prominence

  3. • Modality

  4. • Counterfactuality

Research Interests