Margaret Kroll

Intro

I graduated with a PhD in Linguistics from UCSC in June, 2020. My research encompasses both formal theoretic and psycholinguistic questions in semantics and pragmatics. I'm interested in the general question of how we communicate more than what we say, both through general pragmatic reasoning and through processes like ellipsis and anaphora. My psycholinguistics research focuses on how meaning and discourse are represented in memory. You can find my projects and papers here.

I was also a co-founder and former co-organizer of our semantics/pragmatics reading group, SPLAP!, and a member of our psycholinguistics lab, s/lab. I am currently a Research Fellow in the Linguistics Department, and a Language Engineer at Amazon.

Research

My research includes formal semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. My dissertation argues that ellipsis comprehension relies on an active search procedure subject to locality and topicality constraints; you can see my defense presentation here. Some of my papers are given below; please see my CV for a comprehensive list.

Formal Theoretical Research
under review. Bare adverbial responses and the typology of polarity ellipsis. with Tom Roberts.
2019. Polarity reversals under sluicing. Semantics & Pragmatics 12(18).
2019. Stating the obvious: Of course as a focus-sensitive marker of uncontroversiality. with Tom Roberts. In Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 23: 37-53.
2017.  Identity and Interpretation: Syntactic and Pragmatic Constraints on the Acceptability of Sluicing. with Deniz Rudin. In The 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS): 177-190.
2016. Polarity reversals under sluicing. In Sinn und Bedeutung 21 (SuB): 713-729.

Psycholinguistics/Experimental Research
My dissertation experimentally investigates the comprehension of noun-phrase ellipsis using off-line comprehension measures and on-line measures of incremental processing. Please email me for a draft. I am also (slowly) making my IbexFarm and R code available on github.

under revision. Truth value judgments are sensitive to the pragmatics of the task. with Amanda Rysling and Adrian Brasoveanu.
in prep. Working memory resource allocation is not modulated by clausal discourse status. with Matt Wagers.
2019. The search for truth: Appositives weigh in. with Amanda Rysling. Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 29: 180-200.
2017. Is working memory sensitive to discourse status? Experimental evidence from responsive appositives. XPrag 2017 poster. with Matt Wagers.

About

I am from Michigan but have spent most of my adult life moving around the country. I've lived in London, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and now Santa Cruz and have loved all these places in their own way. I enjoy being outdoors and living on the Pacific, and spend most of my free time sailing and surfing.

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';