My research is within the field of formal semantics and pragmatics, grounded in data from Romance languages, Hungarian and English.  Areas that have been of particular interest to me are the semantics of mood, nominal semantics, and, more recently, context structure and the semantics and pragmatics of declarative and interrogative sentences.

Within nominal semantics I have worked on issues concerning definiteness, indefiniteness and specificity, with particular attention paid to the distribution and interpretation of various types of indefinite noun phrases in English, Hungarian and Romanian.  The view I have pursued is that determiners encode constraints on variation or stability of witness choice across various parameters. In collaboration with H. de Swart, I explored the topic of the semantics of nominal incorporation, and the semantics and pragmatics of number in nominals. Problems connected to the scopal properties of indefinites have figured in my early work and are the subject of a 2011 paper in Linguistics and Philosophy written in collaboration with Adrian Brasoveanu.

Issues related to context structure and the semantics and pragmatics of sentence types are a long-standing interest but a relatively recent topic of active research. The empirical problem that started my involvement in this area is the account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles (yes and no in English and their sisters across languages). The theoretical issue that drives this work is to capture the similarities and differences across assertions and questions and the sentence types used to express them.

The PhD students I (co)-supervised are Cleo Condoravdi, Chris Kennedy, Christine Gunlogson, Lynsey Wolter, Peter Alrenga, James Isaacs, Kyle Rawlins, Scott AnderBois, Robert Henderson, Oliver Northrup and Hitomi Hirayama.

Recently, I taught at CreteLing: Non-canonical questions, with Regine Eckardt (2022), Mood distribution, with Paul Portner (2023), and Introduction to Semantics (2024).