Eli Sharf

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I'm a third-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. Before graduate school, I studied both linguistics and computer science at Brown University, and then worked on NLU (Natural Language Understanding) at Google for five years.

My research lies within semantics, pragmatics, and their interface. It broadly aims to understand how conversation-level information is encoded in the semantics of natural languages, and, conversely, how semantic information is utilized by speakers during conversation, with the goal of developing more substantive theories about this interface. In particular, I have worked extensively on referring expressions, deixis, and pronoun comprehension in English, and on the information structural notions of focus and topic in Q’anjob’al (Mayan).