October 11, 2018
Welcome to Pete Alrenga, who has just joined us as a visitor! Pete sends the following words about himself:
Hi! I'll be visiting from UMass Amherst until mid-November, and I'll be working with Line Mikkelsen while I'm here. Line and I are developing a project around a long-standing mutual interest of ours, namely the structure and interpretation of identity, similative, and equative constructions. In English, these notions are canonically expressed by same, different, like, such, so, etc., and our own previous work has explored the intriguing double lives that these items lead as comparative operators and anaphoric devices. One of the major goals of our project is to extend our understanding of such items/constructions to lesser-studied languages, and to assess the extent to which this range of uses is attested cross-linguistically.
Most of my past work has explored issues in the semantics and pragmatics of scalarity: degree comparatives, numerals and their modifiers, and more recently, scalar implicatures and Grice's nondetachability doctrine. I'm looking forward to my stay here at UC Berkeley...stop by some time and say hello!