Current projects

• Gradable expressions of modality and modal discourse
• Semantic change in the revival of Hebrew (funded by Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Personal Research Grant no. 2299/19, 2019-2023)
• Verbal mood and the expression of attitude
• Corpus creation and annotation
  • The Jerusalem Corpus of Emergent Modern Hebrew (JEMH) (follow us on github, annis - searchable online!)
  • The Georgetown Modality corpus (requires login, get in touch for access)
  • Modality annotation workshop
  • Transcription Marathon in cooperation with the National Library of Israel

From my work

(with Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito) Eventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses Natural Language Semantics, 2024.

(with Elena Herburger) From temporal to concessive meanings: a semantic analysis of 'still' Proceedings of SALT 33, 2023.

The varied readings of Hebrew 'still' and its development into a discourse marker Hebrew Linguistics, to appear. In Hebrew.

On the desire meaning of the motion verb "come": the case of Hebrew "ba" Helkat Lashon 55: 36-60, 2022-2023. In Hebrew.

(with Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito) Subeventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses Proceedings of NELS 52, 2022.

(with Valentina Pyatkin, Shoval Sadde, Reut Tsarfaty, and Paul Portner) Machine classification of modal meanings: an empirical study and some consequences Poster presented at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM), 2022.

(with Avi Shmidman) NLP in the DH pipeline: transfer-learning to a chronolect Proceedings of NLP4DH, 2021.

(with Valentina Pyatkin, Shoval Sadde, Paul Portner, and Reut Tsarfaty) The possible, the plausible, and the desirable: event-based modality detection for language processing Proceedings of ACL, 2021.

Weak necessity In "The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics", D. Gutzmann, L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann, T. E. Zimmerman (eds.), Wiley Blackwell, 2020.

(with Paul Portner) Modal objects or modal quantifiers? Theoretical Linguistics 46: 331–337, 2020.

(with Paul Portner) Desire, belief, and semantic composition: variation in mood selection with desire predicates Natural Language Semantics 28: 343–393, 2020.

Historical corpora meet the Digital Humanities: The Jerusalem Corpus of Emergent Modern Hebrew Language Resources and Evaluation 53: 807-835, 2019.

Existential possessive modality in the emergence of Modern Hebrew (prepublication draft) In "Linguistic Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew", E. Doron, M. Rappaport Hovav, Y. Reshef, and M. Taube (eds.), John Benjamins, 2019.

(with Elena Herburger) Gradable possibility and epistemic comparison Journal of Semantics 36(1): 165–191, 2019.

Straddling the line between attitude verbs and necessity modals (draft) In "Modality Across Syntactic Categories", A. Arregui, M. L. Rivero, and A. Salanova (eds.), OUP, 2017.

(with Paul Portner) Extreme and non-extreme deontic modals (draft) In "Deontic Modality", N. Charlow and M. Chrisman (eds.), OUP, 2016.

(with Ivy Sichel and Avigail Tsirkin-Sadan) Superfluous negation in Modern Hebrew and its origins Journal of Jewish Languages 3(1-2): 165–182, 2015.

(with Edit Doron) Varieties of alternative unconditionals Proceedings of IATL 2014, 2015.

On necessity and comparison Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 95: 512–554, 2014.

(with Elena Herburger) Is 'more possible' more possible in German? Proceedings of SALT 24, 2014.

Review of Narrog 2012, Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change Linguist List 24.2942, 2013.

(with Hillary Harner, Elizabeth Krawczyk, Daniel Simonson, Graham Katz, and Paul Portner) Toward fine-grained annotation of modality in text Proceedings of IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM), 2013.

Figuring out what we ought to do: the challenge of delineating priorities Proceeding of the 36th Penn Linguistics Colloquium (U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 19, No. 1), 2013.

(with Paul Portner) Mood and contextual commitment Proceedings of SALT 22, 2012.

(with Graham Katz and Paul Portner) Ordering combination for modal comparison Proceedings of SALT 22, 2012.

Dissertation

2012. Roots of Modality. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. [pdf]

Older stuff

(with Dan Simonson, Joo Chung, Hillary Harner, Graham Katz and Paul Portner) Developing a methodology for modality type annotations on a large scale (slides) Paper presented at the Modality Workshop @ OttawaU, 2012.

(with Dan Simonson, Joo Chung, and Hillary Harner) Categorizing modals with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Poster presented at the 2nd MACSIM workshop, 2012.

Needing to have but not needing: the limited modal potential of intensional transitive verbs Poster presented at CUNY 23, 2010.

(with Masashi Hashimoto) Decoupling tense and aspect in Chinese Manuscript, UMass Amherst, 2010.

Groups in the semantics of reciprocal verbs Proceedings of NELS 38, 2009.

Using LSA to detect irony. Paper presented at CL2003 workshop, 2003.