Common to work in semantics and pragmatics at UCSC is a formal approach to theoretically relevant problems grounded in detailed investigation of empirical data coming from a variety of languages. A thread uniting the research of the faculty and students here is attention to both semantic and pragmatic factors with particular emphasis on understanding language in context. Research topics, theoretical tools and languages considered are quite diverse. Recent work by faculty and students working in semantics and pragmatics has involved, besides English, Amharic, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, Mayan languages, Yoruba, and Zazaki. Topics currently investigated by faculty and students are distributivity, number interpretation, indefinites, propositional attitude predicates, affective language, noun phrase scope, and the semantics and pragmatics of polarity particles across languages. See the faculty members' and dissertators' websites below for more details.

Faculty

• Pranav Anand
• Adrian Brasoveanu
• Donka Farkas

Dissertators

• Robert Henderson

Recent alumni (see allrecent)

• Scott AnderBois (University of Connecticut) 2011 Issues and Alternatives 
• Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins) 2008 Concession, Conditionals and Free Choice
• Peter Alrenga (Boston U) 2007 Dimensionality in the Semantics of Comparatives
• James Isaacs 2007 Supposition in Discourse
• Lynsey Wolter (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire) 2006 That's That: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases

• Christopher Potts (Stanford) 2003 The Logic of Conventional Implicature
• Christine Gunlogson (Rochester University) 2001 True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English
• Ryan Bush 2000 A Typology of Focal Categories
• Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago) 1997 Projecting the Adjective: The Syntax and Semantics of Gradability and Comparison
• Theodore Fernald (Swarthmore) 1994 On the Nonuniformity of the Individual- and Stage-Level Effects
• Michael Johnston 1994 The Semantics of Adverbial Adjuncts
• Louise McNally (Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) 1992 An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction
• Chris Barker (NYU) 1991 Possessive Descriptions

Current visitors (see past or current or future)

• Floris Roelofsen (Institute for Logic, Language and Computation; U. of Amsterdam)
• Craig H. Martell (Naval Postgraduate School)
• Olga Kagan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
• Karen Lahousse (Research Foundation - Flanders, Belgium)
• Aviva Shimelman (Université Laval, Québec City, Canada)
• David Beaver (Stanford University)
• Theodora Alexopoulou (Cambridge University, England)
• Malte Zimmermann (Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics, The Netherlands)
• Henriette de Swart (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
• Edit Doron (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
• Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Klaus von Heusinger (University of Konstanz, Germany)
• Tanya Reinhart (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
• Ewan Klein (University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
• Alessandro Lenci (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy)

• Craig H. Martell (Naval Postgraduate School)

• Coming soon.

Research Groups

• The Santa Cruz Linguistics and Philosophy Group
• Semantics & Pragmatics Lab
• Corpus Linguistics Group
• S-Circle

Recent Events

• UCSC Polarity Workshop
• California Universities Semantics & Pragmatics 1
• California Universities Semantics & Pragmatics 2
• California Universities Semantics & Pragmatics 3

Recent Seminars

• Cross-Sentential and Intra-Sentential Evidence for Decomposing Quantification (Brasoveanu), Fall 2008
• Attitudes and the Expressions They Embed (Into) (Anand), Fall 2009
• Context Structure, Speech Acts and Discourse Particles (Farkas), Fall 2010