Morwenna Hoeks

I'm a fifth-year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at UCSC. Broadly, my research interests lie in semantics and its interfaces. I approach this both from a formal theoretical perspective, as well as a processing perspective.

A large proportion of my work revolves around the notion of alternatives as semantic/pragmatic objects and their connection to the formation of questions, the interpretation of (free choice) disjunction, focus structure, intonation and the organization of discourse more generally.

On the processing side, I'm interested in the way interpretations are built up and processed incrementally. My dissertation investigates how alternative sets are built on-line and how they affect the processing of foci and focus-sensitive particles. I also have some ongoing projects on the memory encoding of prosody, and on the interpretation of various types of anaphora in discourse.

On the theoretical side, my work involves the way in which different alternative-generating expressions (foci, disjunctions, questions, existentials) interact to form complex meanings. I'm also interested in the question of what role prosody and intonation should play within a general theory of meaning.