Tim Hunter

Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Linguistics
Yale University

tim dot hunter at yale dot edu

Research

Syntax/Semantics

I construct formal characterisations of the syntax and semantics of natural language. My starting point for this line of research was an interest in the argument/adjunct distinction and the extent to which explanations for puzzling syntactic patterns might derive from the ways arguments and adjuncts contribute to neo-Davidsonian logical forms. This was the focus of my dissertation. The system I developed there makes interesting connections, which I've been investigating more recently, with other topics such as remnant movement, redundancies between merge and move, and extraposition.

Eliminating Rightward Movement: Extraposition as flexible linearisation of adjuncts (with Robert Frank). Under review.
Deconstructing merge and move to make room for adjunction. Under review.
A Constraint on Remnant Movement. To appear in Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar, A. M. de Sciullo (ed).
Insertion Minimalist Grammars: Eliminating redundancies between merge and move, Proceedings of Mathematics of Language 2011.
(The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com)
Monograph (2011, John Benjamins): Syntactic Effects of Conjunctivist Semantics: Unifying Movement and Adjunction
Dissertation (2010): Relating Movement and Adjunction in Syntax and Semantics [abstract]
Unifying Adjunct Islands and Freezing Effects in Minimalist Grammars, Proceedings of TAG+10 2010. [slides (PDF)]
Deriving Syntactic Properties of Arguments and Adjuncts from Neo-Davidsonian Semantics, Proceedings of Mathematics of Language 2009.
(The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com)
Related posters:
- Decomposing merge and move to make room for adjunction. Presented at GLOW 34, Vienna, April 2011.
- Syntactic Effects of Conjunctivist Interpretation. Presented at 'The Language Design', Montreal, May 2010.
Phrase Structure and Conjunctivist Interpretation. Generals paper, March 2008. [defense slides (PDF)] [defense handout (PDF)]

Verification and Acquisition of Quantification/Determiners

Along with Paul Pietroski, Jeff Lidz, and Justin Halberda, I'm studying the semantics of quantificational words like 'most'. Based on careful consideration of how linguistic meaning interacts with other cognitive systems (eg. psychology of number, visual perception), results of our studies indicate that linguistic meaning is not entirely divorced from verification procedures in the way that is implicitly assumed by much standard practice in semantics.

Interface Transparency and the Psychosemantics of 'most', Natural Language Semantics, 2011.
The Meaning 'most': Semantics, Numerosity and Psychology, Mind and Language, 2009.
Beyond Truth Conditions: The semantics of 'most', Proceedings of SALT 2008. [slides as PPT file] [slides as PDF file]

I've also done some experiments, with Jeff Lidz and others, looking at four- and five-year-olds' learning of determiner meanings. The aim of this work is to see how closely the learner's hypothesis space of available determiner meanings reflects existing typological generalisations, such as the restriction to conservative determiner meanings.

Conservativity and learnability of determiners. Accepted for publication in Journal of Semantics.
Children's restrictions on the meanings of novel determiners, Proceedings of BUCLD 2008. [slides as PPT file] [slides as PDF file]
Restrictions on the meanings of determiners, Proceedings of SALT 2009. [poster]

Other odds and ends

With Philip Resnik, I've worked on improving phrase-based statistical translation models, using dependency trees to provide better information about how constituents should be ordered in the target language. The idea behind this is to use "hierarchically informed" ordering strategies without throwing away the advantages of phrase-based translation.
- Exploiting Syntactic Relationships in a Phrase-based Decoder, Machine Translation, 2010. (The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com)
- Extending Phrase-based Decoding with a Dependency-based Reordering Model, UMIACS tech report (longer version of the above).
Reassessing the argument for tucking-in. Poster presented at MASL (Minimalist Approaches to Syntactic Locality), Budapest, Aug. 2009, with Shiti Malhotra.

Teaching

Spring 2011 (Yale): Instructor for LING261/661: Minimalist Grammars and the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Spring 2010 (UMD): Instructor for LING419: Fitting Syntax and Semantics Together
Spring 2009 (UMD): Instructor for LING419: Fitting Syntax and Semantics Together
Fall 2008 (UMD): TA for LING200: Introductory Linguistics
Spring 2008 (UMD): TA for LING311: Syntax I

From "Down Under"

I'm originally from Sydney, Australia but moved to the US for graduate school in 2005. As an undergraduate I studied mainly computer science and French, but towards the end I became more interested in linguistics.

In Sydney I studied at the University of New South Wales from 2000-2004, mainly in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (where I also did some teaching) and the French and Linguistics departments. Most of my involvement with linguistics was with Mengistu Amberber. I also spent a semester on exchange at Ecole des Mines d'Ales, France, in 2002-03.

In my spare time I was what's known in Australia as a "cricket tragic" (a fanatical follower of the game) and also a founding member of the STALW indoor cricket team. I still generally make it back to Sydney for the annual Test match in January, but in between my cricket exposure is sadly fairly sparse.

In my not-so-spare time I was a proud member of the small software development team at Brain Juice.

If you would like a one-minute introduction to Australia, have a look at this.