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:
February 18th: The Second MACSIM @ the University of Maryland
March 14-16: CUNY – 25th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing
- Presuppositions and Projection in Processing [with Sonja Tiemann] (Talk, 3/14 morning session)
- Domain Restriction and Discourse Structure – Evidence from Processing (Poster, 3/14 evening session)
- On the processing of epistemic modals [Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz, and John Trueswell] (Poster, 3/14 evening session)
- The collective bias? Using eye movements to examine collective vs. distributive interpretations of plural sets [Christine Boylan, Dimka Atanassov, Florian Schwarz, and John Trueswell] (Poster, 3/16 mid-day session)
March 23-25: PLC
May 3rd: Colloquium at CUNY
Teaching:
LING 106: Introduction to Formal Linguistics [Next instantiation: Fall 2012; syllabus (2009 version)]
LING 255: Formal Semantics and Cognitive Science. [Spring 2012]
LING 380/580: Semantics I (Syllabus) Graduate level introduction to formal semantics, also serves as advanced course for undergraduates [Next instantiation: Fall 2012]
LING 581: Semantics II (continuation of LING 580).[Next instantiation: Spring 2013]
Some Recent Work
2012. Different Types of Definites Crosslinguistically. (submitted)
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. (accepted) Natural Language Semantics (draft version)
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)
[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)
