I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics department at UPenn. I also am a member of the Graduate Group in Psychology. My main interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics of natural language. I also do psycholinguistic research, primarily on semantic and pragmatic processing. (See my lab website)
[read more about my interests]
Spring 2012 Activities:
March 12-15: Workshop on The Syntax and Semantics of Pseudo-Incorporation at the DGfS meeting 2013, Potsdam, Germany
Current Teaching:
LING 001: Introduction to Linguistics [Spring 2014 (Syllabus (2013 version)]
LING 106: Introduction to Formal Linguistics [Fall 2013; syllabus (2012 version)]
LING 608: Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics [Fall 2013]
LING 653: Topics in the Syntax-Semantics Interface [Spring 2014]
LING 255: Formal Semantics and Cognitive Science. [last offered Spring 2012]
LING 380/580: Semantics I (Syllabus) Graduate level introduction to formal semantics, also serves as advanced course for undergraduates [Fall 2012]
LING 581: Semantics II (continuation of LING 580).[Spring 2013]
Publications, Manuscripts, and Talk Slides for Download
(see CV for full list of publications)
2013. Different Types of Definites Crosslinguistically. (pre-final draft; revised version to appear in the Language and Linguistics Compass)
2013. How weak and how definite are Weak Definites? (pre-final draft; to appear in a volume on Weak Referentiality, edited by Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Bert Le Bruyn, and Joost Zwarts, to be published in the Linguistics Today series of John Benjamins)
2013. [Florian Schwarz and Sonja Tiemann] The Path of Presupposition Projection in Processing – The Case of Conditionals. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17, E. Chemla, V. Homer, G. Winterstein (eds), pp. 527-544. (Talk slides, Poster version)
2013. Maximality and Definite Plurals – Experimental Evidence. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17, E. Chemla, V. Homer, G. Winterstein (eds), pp. 509-526. (Poster version)
2012. Rejecting statements with non-referring definites – experimental support for a presuppositional view (under revision)
2012. [Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz, and John Trueswell] On the processing of might. Proceedings of PLC 36, UPenn Working Papers in Linguistics 19.1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
2012. Presupposition Processing – The Case of German wieder. [Florian Schwarz and Sonja Tiemann]. Post-Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium 2011 (pre-print version)
2012. Situation pronouns in Determiner Phrases. Natural Language Semantics, December 2012, Volume 20, Issue 4, pp 431-475 (DOI: 10.1007/s11050-012-9086-1)
2012. Domain Restriction and Discourse Structure – Evidence from Processing. Poster presented at the 25th CUNY Sentence Processing Conference
2011. Situation Pronouns and Nominal Domain Restriction. (Draft, July 2011; under revision)
[supersedes the second part of `Situation pronouns where you need them' (2010), which has been split into two papers.]
2011. Topics and Situations – Comments on Hinterwimmer. [Commentary paper on Stefan Hinterwimmer's paper from the NELS pronoun workshop at MIT. Hinterwimmer's slides from the workshop are available here; the paper version is not yet publicly available]
2011. A matter of Ambiguity [Christine Boylan, Dimka Atanassaov, Florian Schwarz, and John Trueswell]. Talk presented at the 4th Biennial Conference of Experimental Pragmatics, Barcelona, Spain.
2010. Affective ‘this’. [Potts, Christopher and Florian Schwarz] Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 3(5):1-30.
2009. The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora. [Constant, Noah; Christopher Davis; Christopher Potts; and Florian Schwarz.] Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 33(1-2):5-21.
2009. Two Types of Definites in Natural Language, PhD thesis, University
of Massachusetts Amherst. (Chair: Angelika Kratzer)
2009 [to appear]. Maximize Presupposition and Two Types of Definite Competitors. [Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menendez-Benito and Florian Schwarz] In Proceedings of NELS 39, Amherst, MA: GLSA.2009 [to appear].
[to appear] Strengthening ‘or’: Effects of Focus and Downward Entailing Contexts on Scalar Implicatures. [Florian Schwarz, Charles Clifton, Jr. and Lyn Frazier] In: Anderssen, Moulton, Schwarz & Ussery (eds.) UMOP 37: Semantic Processing. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
2008. Exclamatives and heightened emotion: Extracting pragmatic generalizations from large corpora. [Chris Potts and Florian Schwarz] Manuscript.
2007. Processing Presupposed Content. Journal of Semantics 24(4): 373-416; doi: 10.1093/jos/ffm011 [Full paper freely available from Journal website if you click here]
2007. Ex-situ focus in Kikuyu. In Aboh, Hartmann & Zimmermann (eds.) Focus Strategies in African Languages: The Interaction of Focus and Grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 139-159 [draft]
2006. On NEEDING propositions and LOOKING FOR properties. In: M. Gibson, J. Howell (eds), SALT XVI 259-276, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. (Click here for online version of Proceedings from SALT XVI)
