I’m a postdoctoral associate in the linguistics & philosophy department at MIT. I’m a theoretical linguist, which means that my work involves developing formal models of what we know when we know a language. Mostly, I do semantics, but I’m also interested in syntax, morphology, pragmatics, and their interfaces with semantics.
When I’m not doing linguistics, I code, read, and scale vertical walls.
Reach me at: pdell@mit.edu
Recent and upcoming
- June 11, 2019: I gave an invited talk at Göttingen university entitled “Movement as higher-order structure building”. slides
- June 13-14, 2019: I gave a joint talk with Uli Sauerland at the workshop Exhaustivity in Questions and Answers entitled “Nuclear intervention: deriving Beck effects via cyclic scope and local exhaustification”, in Tübingen. slides
- July 1-3, 2019: I gave two talks at the workshop Asymmetries in language: presuppositions and beyond at ZAS Berlin. One by myself entitled “Two souls of disjunction: towards a state-monadic update semantics” (slides), and one joint with Yasu Sudo entitled “Binding back from the future” (slides).
- I have a paper to appear in the Proceedings of LENLS 15 entitled “Applicatives for Anaphora and Presupposition”.
- I have a paper to appear in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23 with Uli Sauerland entitled “Ineffability and unexhaustification”.