Professor of Linguistics
The Ohio State University

My main areas of specialization within linguistics are formal semantics and pragmatics. Within these fields, my principal research interests are:

• Anaphora, definiteness, and specificity
• How to formally model the role of context in interpretation: Presupposition, focus, implicature, perspective, and domain restriction
• The semantics and pragmatics of modality, mood, tense, and aspect

As a student I studied formal semantics under Barbara H. Partee at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford, where I was exposed to interdisciplinary work on pragmatics in the tradition of Paul Grice, and work on Planning Theory in AI. Like many linguists, part of my motivation in studying human language is a compelling interest in the nature of the human mind. My work on pragmatics is driven by that orientation, and it has resulted in a deepening dialogue with colleagues in computer science, logic, philosophy, and psychology. In this vein, I am involved in an interdisciplinary Pragmatics Initiative, involving not only scholars and graduate students from the relevant disciplines at OSU, but also other scholars from the U.S. and Europe.

Recently I've been collaborating with David Beaver, Mandy Simons, and Judith Tonhauser, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, to study Projective Meanings: presupposition, conventional implicature, and other non-assertoric aspects of utterance meaning. And I'm a member of the German Science Foundation Research Network Questions in Discourse. I'm also an Associate Editor of the journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and a member of the editorial board of Semantics and Pragmatics. During the 2012-2013 academic year, I hold a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. This coming summer I'll be at ESSLLI 25 in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Office Hours suspended in 2012-2013

Contact Information:
Email: croberts AT ling.osu.edu
Phone: (614) 292-8302
210 Oxley Hall
Columbus, OH 43210