Oliver Northrup’s Research

Research History About Contact

Interests

Semantics (and syntax)

I'm currently focused on discourse structure and formal representations of non-asserted meaning. So far, my work often draws from East Asian language isolates like Japanese and Ainu. Japanese honorification in particular has captured my attention; I'm very interested in formal representations of sonkeigo (尊敬語) and kensongo (謙遜語). I also like discourse particles; my first Qualifying Paper, finished May 2011, is about the Japanese sentence-final particles yo and ne, and was advised by Donka Farkas.

Phonology

I'm involved in an experimental project on back-transliteration of loanwords being advised by Junko Ito. The project uses experimental methodologies to probe the underlying forms of loanwords, the results of which have a number of repercusions for perception and loanword adaptation.

Psycholinguistics

Semantic comprehension also interests me. Specifically, I'm trying to learn more about the nature of the module of sentence comprehension responsible for computing meaning, building mental representations of discourse, and making that information available for further language comprehension and general cognition. I've mainly looked at the interactions between focus constructions and presuppositions so far.

Papers and presentations