Morgan Moyer

pic with bw sweater

About me

I am currently a post-doc at the Sorbonne, jointly supervised by Anouch Bourmayan (Sorbonne), Isidora Stojanovic (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS / EHESS / CNRS), and Brent Strickland (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS / EHESS / CNRS). This project is a cross between linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science looking at the significance of affective information in language processing. I was formerly a post-doc at the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle (CNRS / Université Paris-Cité) working under the direction of Ira Noveck on a project about the semantics and pragmatics of discourse connectives. From 2020-2021, I was funded by an NSF-SPRF grant to work with Judith Degen in the ALPS lab looking at the semantics and pragmatics of (non-)exhaustivity in wh-questions using corpus-based and computational methods.

I defended my dissertation in Linguistics at Rutgers University in July 2020. My dissertation, "The question of questions: resolving (non-)exhaustivity in wh-questions" was an experimental investigation of the semantics and pragmatics of (non-)exhaustivity. My chair was Kristen Syrett, and the committee included Veneeta Dayal, Paul Pietroski, Yimei Xiang, and Alex Lascarides (external).

My research interests include pragmatics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and learnability, Cognitive Science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. In particular, I'm interested in the interaction between linguistic representations and other areas of cognition, and what that reveals about cognitive architecture (although, that's a difficult question). I was a member of the Laboratory for Developmental Language Studies, directed by Kristen Syrett. I received a Certificate in Cognitive Science through the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Previously, I was a research assistant at the Project on Children's Language Learning at the University of Maryland. I worked there on several projects with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz on the acquisition of the semantics/pragmatics of attitude verbs.

I am also working with Bruce Tesar on the learnability of prosodic systems. I explore the challenge of maintaining restrictiveness in the face of paradigmatic subsets, and propose an inductive solution using Tesar's (2014) Output-Driven Learning Algorithm which solves this problem by exploiting neutralizations evident from a language's phonotactic distribution.

In my free time I hang out with my cat, Cezi, rollerskate, play guitar, and read Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I dropped out of college in 2006. Before linguistics, I was a florist.

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