Ezra Keshet will be our visiting Assistant Professor in 2008-09, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra will teach two of our semantics courses in 2008-09. He is current completing his PhD in semantics at MIT, but his work also touches on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.

His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.

Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.

Welcome, Ezra!