Adrian Brasoveanu
Department of Linguistics
Office phone:
Email: abrsvn@stanford.edu
Web page: http://abrsvn.googlepages.com/index.html

Field: semantics/pragmatics

Research Interests: theories integrating different semantic and pragmatic frameworks; (parallels between) anaphora and quantification in the individual, modal, temporal and degree domains; the logical foundations of Optimality Theory; Romanian, Romance and Balkan languages.

Adrian Brasoveanu received a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Bucharest and a PhD in Linguistics with a Cognitive Science Certificate from Rutgers.

His dissertation, "Structured Nominal and Modal Reference", argues that discourse reference in natural language involves two equally important components with the same interpretive dynamics, namely reference to values, i.e. non-singleton sets of objects (individuals and possible worlds), and reference to structure, i.e. relations / dependencies between such sets that are introduced and incrementally elaborated upon in discourse. The novel dynamic system couched in classical type logic within which structured reference is defined and investigated enables us to compositionally account for a variety of phenomena, including: mixed weak & strong donkey anaphora, e.g. "Every person who buys a computer and has a credit card uses it to pay for it," quantificational subordination, e.g. "Harvey courts a girl at every convention. She always comes to the banquet with him" (Karttunen 1976) and discourses exhibiting interactions between conditionals, anaphora and the entailment particle "therefore," e.g. "[A] man cannot live without joy. Therefore, when he is deprived of true spiritual joys, it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures" (Thomas Aquinas).

His current projects include preparing the material in the dissertation for publication, applying the proposed theory to new empirical domains (exceptional wide scope indefinites, speech act/attitude reports and the dynamics of questions) and integrating alternative semantics into the framework to study the interactions between (structured) anaphora, alternative sets and conversational goals, e.g. the semantics and pragmatics of information packaging.

This year, he will be teaching a graduate seminar on the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites and an undergraduate introductory course in formal semantics and pragmatics.

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This page was last modified on July 12, 2007