Mandy Simons

About

Currently working on: Communication without Common Ground: Arguing for and developing an alternative to the common-ground based model of conversation -- see my recent paper in Linguistics and Philosophy 'Availability Without Common Ground'. I've also worked on Implicature, Convention, Bridging and definiteness, and Disjunction. I am the Director of the Program in Linguistics at CMU and an Associate Editor of Semantics and Pragmatics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Algorithm
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• History

Selected publications

• Questions Under Discussion: Where Information Structure Meets Projective Content

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2016-11-04 · 194 citations

  article

  We discuss problems familiar from the literature on presupposition and information structure, and illustrate how a synthesis using the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework yields fresh insight. In this framework, discourse is analyzed in terms of the strategy of inquiry pursued by the interlocutors, and individual utterances are interpreted relative to the question being addressed. This way of thinking offers a new perspective on diverse phenomena, including the projection of presupposition…

  PublisherDOI

• The CommitmentBank: Investigating projection in naturally occurring discourse

  Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) · 2019-07-25 · 181 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper describes a new resource, the CommitmentBank, developed for the empirical investigation of the projection of finite clausal complements. A clausal complement is said to project when its content is understood as a commitment of the speaker even though the clause occurs under the scope of an entailment canceling operator such as negation or a question. The study of projection is therefore part of the study of commitments expressed by speakers to non-asserted sentence content. The conten…

  PublisherDOI

• The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives

  Discourse Processes · 2016-03-24 · 99 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which accommodates the variability of the data and sensit…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issues in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Disjunction

  2016-11-18 · 38 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  First published in 2000, this book is about sentences containing the word or, dealing primarily with sentences in which or conjoins clauses, but also some cases in which it conjoins expressions of other categories. The author aims to give an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction, and to use this account in explaining the behaviour of presupposition projection and of anaphora in disjunctive sentences. The author begins by giving an account of the discourse pro…

  PublisherDOI

• Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework

  Inquiry · 2016-12-09 · 32 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that such…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: What's the question? A cross-linguistic investigation into compositional and pragmatic constraints on the question under discussion

  NSF · $82k · 2015–2019

• Collaborative Research: Semantics and Pragmatics of Projective Meaning across Languages

  NSF · $118k · 2010–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Judith Tonhauser

  University of Stuttgart

  8 shared

• Craige Roberts

  The Ohio State University

  7 shared

• David Beaver

  7 shared

• Stacey Swain

  2 shared

• Kathy Alstat

  2 shared

• Kathleen Jamison

  2 shared

• Chris Dyer

  2 shared

• Lori Levin

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Cornell University

  1998

Similar researchers at Carnegie Mellon University

• Peter Spirtesh-46
• Alex John Londonh-39
• Richard Scheinesh-35