In compliance with LA City orders to slow the spread of COVID-19, our faculty and staff are working remotely until further notice. Our staff can be reached via email during our normal office hours, M-F 8am-5pm. For general inquiries, please e-mail linguist@humnet.ucla.edu. UCLA will be closed on March 21-25 for Spring Break.
Publications
Harris, Jesse A. & Katy Carlson (to appear). Information structure preferences in focus-sensitive ellipsis: How defaults persist. Language & Speech.
Carlson, Katy & Jesse A. Harris (2017). Zero-Adjective contrast in much-less ellipsis: the advantage for parallel syntax. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience.
Harris, Jesse A., Sun-Ah Jun, & Adam J. Royer (2016). Implicit prosody pulls its weight: Recovery from garden path sentences. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8, Boston, MA.
Harris, Jesse A. & Katy Carlson (2016). Keep it local (and final): Remnant preferences for let alone ellipsis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69: 1278-1301.
Harris, Jesse A. (2016). Processing let alone coordination in silent reading. Lingua. [NB. The article was accepted before the en masse resignation of its editorial staff. Support Glossa instead.]
Harris, Jesse A. (2015). Structure modulates similarity-based interference in sluicing: An eye tracking study. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:1839. Special issue: Encoding and navigating linguistic representations in memory.
Fishbein, Joel & Jesse A. Harris (2014). Making sense of Kafka: Structural biases induce early sense commitment for metonyms. Journal of Memory and Language, 76: 94-112. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2014). Signaling non-speaker commitment in transparent free relatives: A paired speaker-hearer judgment study. In: Rieser, Verena and Philippe Muller (Eds.), The Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 71-79. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2014). Who else but Sarah? In: Schütze, Carson & Linnaea Stockall (Eds.), Connectedness: Papers in Celebration of Sarah VanWagenen. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, No. 18 (pp. 175-187). Los Angeles, CA. BibTeX
Frazier, Lyn, Charles Clifton, Jr., Katy Carlson, & Jesse A. Harris (2014). Standing alone with prosodic help. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 28(10):1519-1544. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2013). Interjective ‘what’. In The Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 23, pp. 19-39. Anca Chereches et al (eds.). Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A., Charles Clifton, Jr., & Lyn Frazier (2013). Processing and domain restriction: Quantificational variability effects. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(10): 1519-1544 BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2012). On the Semantics of Domain Adjectives in English. In The Proceedings of the 30th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Arnett, Nathan and Ryan Bennett (eds.) University of California, Santa Cruz. BibTeX
Cable, Seth & Jesse A. Harris (2011). On the Grammatical Status of PP-Pied-Piping in English: Results from Sentence-Rating Experiments. In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics: Processing Linguistic Structure. Volume 38, pp. 1-22. Harris & Grant (eds.) GLSA Publications, Amherst, MA. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2011). Extraction from Coordinate Structures: Evidence from Language Processing. In Proceedings from the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. & Christopher Potts (2011). Predicting perspectival orientation for appositives. In Proceedings from the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. & Christopher Potts (2009). Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. Linguistics & Philosophy 32(6):523-552. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2009). Epithets and perspective shift: experimental evidence. In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers: Papers in Pragmatics. Volume 39, pp. 49 – 76. Biezma & Harris (eds.) GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse, Liina Pylkkänen, Brian McElree, & Steven Frisson (2008). The Cost of Question Concealment: Eye-tracking and MEG evidence.In Brain and Language, 107(1):44-61. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse A. (2008). On the syntax and semantics of Heim’s ambiguity. In the Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. University of California, LA. BibTeX
Harris, Jesse & Terry Regier (2004). The Associative Origin of Words. In Proceedings from the 38th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Andronis et al (eds.), Volume 38-1.
Manuscripts
Work on focus-sensitive coordination submitted. Email me for details.
Harris, Jesse A. (in progress). Alternatives on demand: Processing d-linked phrases in sluices. Draft length: 42 pp.
Harris, J. A. (2007). Revealing Concealment: A (Neuro-)Logical Investigation of Concealed Questions. MSc Thesis, Logic (148 pp). Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Under the supervision of Paul Dekker, Liina Pylkkänen, and Martin Stokhof.
Note: The syntactic account of this thesis has been improved on in Harris (2008). The psycholinguistics work presented here has been published as Harris et al (2008).
Selected Presentations
That’s, what, an approximation? A formal semantics for approximative what. (2013). Harris, J.A. Talk presented at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 23, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Figuring out Kafka: Structural biases induce early sense commitment for metonyms. (2013). Fishbein, J. & Harris, J.A. Poster presented at the 26th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at the University of South Carolina.
Discourse accessibility and structural bias: Processing d-linked phrases in sluices. (2013). Harris, J.A. Poster presented at the 26th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at the University of South Carolina.
The cost of unexpected contrast: processing let alone. (2013). Harris, J.A. Poster presented at the 26th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at the University of South Carolina.
Using Structural Cues in Processing Polysemes. (2013). Fishbein, J. & Harris, J. A. Poster presented at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Boston, MA.
Voltaire was More Easily Duped than Forged: Structural Cues in Processing Polysemy. (2012). Fishbein, J. & Harris, J.A. Talk presented at the Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference (ERP), Madrid, Spain.
On the semantics of domain adjectives in English. (2012). Harris, J.A. Poster at the 30th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), held at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects. (2011). Harris, J. A., Clifton, C. & Frazier, L. Poster presented at the 24th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at Stanford University.
The Pragmatics of Free Indirect Discourse: a questionnaire study. (2010). Harris, J. A. Poster presented at PEPA 2, held at the University of British Columbia.
Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. (2009). Harris, J. A. & Potts, C. Paper presented at the OSU Workshop on Projective Meanings.
Locality, Event-Construal & Extraction: Evidence from Language Processing. (2009). Harris, J. A. Poster presented at the 22nd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at UC Davis.
On the Event-Extraction Correlation: Evidence from Coordinate Structures. (2009). Harris, J. A. Presented at the Proceedings of the 45th Chicago Linguistic Society.
On the syntax and semantics of Heim’s ambiguity. (2008). Harris, J. A. Presented at the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics,held at UCLA.
How do you answer a concealed question? A flexible approach. (2007). Harris, J. A. Presented at Southern New England Workshop on Semantics, held at MIT.
The Interpretation of Concealed Questions. (2006). Harris, J., Pylkkänen, L., McElree, B. & and Frisson, S. Presented at the 19th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference.
The roles of the right hemisphere and the anterior midline field in semantic processing: MEG studies. (2005). Pylkkänen, L., Murphy, G. L., McElree, B., Harris, J. A., Francis, J., Martin, A. E. & Llinás, R. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
Embedded Appositives Corpus
Embedded appositives. An annotated collection of 278 sentences containing appositives embedded syntactically in the complement of propositional attitude predicates and verbs of saying, drawn from 177 million words of novels, newspaper articles, and TV transcripts. Intended to inform work on appositives, conventional implicatures, and textual entailment. Includes a Javascript interface, an XML corpus, and a short write-up describing the data and their theoretical relevance.