Hello! I'm Jess Law, an Assistant Professor in Department of Linguistics at University of California, Santa Cruz. My research interests lie in semantics (pragmatics included) and the experimental approach to studying meaning. I'm actively working on answering the following questions.
- What languages with overt discourse particles (like Cantonese and Mandarin) tell us about the compositional nature of pragmatics? (In collaboration with Diti Bhadra and Haoze Li)
- Why many transitive verbs cannot be used in passives across languages? (In collaboration with Colin Hirschberg)
- Why generic sentences have the special ability to license non-canonical subjects? (In collaboration with Taijing Xiao)
- How to probe and model the discourse potential of bare noun phrases? (In collaboration with Kristen Syrett and Ziling Zhu)
- How are questions with focus intervention effects processed in Mandarin? (in collaboration with Yaqing Cao and Haoze Li)
Before coming to UC Santa Cruz, I studied at Rutgers University for my PhD and Chinese University of Hong Kong for my MPhil and BA.
I go by both Jess and 海琪 (pronounced as hɔɪ keɪ in Cantonese). It's hard to resist thinking about language, but when I managed not to, I enjoy reading about philosophy, science, and history.
You can reach me at jesslaw@ucsc.edu.
