Position-sensitive transparency in vowel harmony: The role of prosodic gestures and locality A recent crosslinguistic study of positional privilege in vowel harmony observed that vowels in a stressed syllable may asymmetrically block harmony, but they are never singled out to be transparent (Kaplan & Walker 2024). This typological gap is not predicted under traditional theoretical...

Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries Some 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved...

Being pragmatic about anankastic conditionals (joint work with Jingyi Chen) So-called ‘anankastic conditionals’, like (1), have vexed standard accounts of modals and conditionals, by presenting an apparent non compositionality problem. Indeed, (1) seems to express that going to Harlem requires taking the A train, rather than the mere desire to do so, a reading standard...