Judith Tonhauser's research

I am a cross-linguistic syntactician and semanticist. In my research, I explore the meaning of natural
language utterances, and how this meaning arises from the linguistic properties of the sentence uttered
and the context in which the sentence was uttered. I am particularly interested in the question of how
languages with very different structural properties express comparable meanings. The data for my
research comes from Yucatec Maya (a Mayan language spoken on the Yucatan peninsula) and Paraguayan
Guaraní (of the Tupí-Guaraní language family). I have conducted yearly fieldwork on (one of)
these languages since 2001, and am very interested in questions about the methodology and ethics of
fieldwork, such as those discussed at this this and this cross-disciplinary workshop on fieldwork that I
co-organized with some of my colleagues.

My research falls into the areas of temporality, modality, focus and presuppositions. I am also involved
in several collaborative research projects. Cynthia Clopper and I explore the prosody of focus in Paraguayan
Guaraní. With Paul Kiparsky, I'm working on an article on the semantics of inflections for the new Handbook
of Semantics (Mouton de Gruyter). David Beaver, Craige Roberts, Mandy Simons and I are collaborating on
developing a cross-linguistic taxonomy of projective meanings funded by a grant (2010 - 2013) by
the National Science Foundation.

Check out the Workshop on Evidentials I'm co-organizing with Brian Joseph and Craige Roberts in January 2011.

To find out more about my work, please have a look at my presentations and papers. Comments are always
welcome!