Sarah Murray

About

Sarah Murray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. Her primary research focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, specifically analyzing the formal representations needed to understand a variety of linguistic structures across grammatically diverse languages. Her work encompasses topics such as evidentiality, modality, plurality, connectives, sentential mood, and speech acts. Murray combines formal theories of meaning and discourse with documentation and analysis of understudied languages, demonstrating a strong interest in language documentation, methodology for elicitation, community-based language work, and collaboration for language revitalization and reclamation. She has worked with the Cheyenne community in Southeastern Montana since 2006 on various language projects and is the director of the Cornell Language Documentation Lab. Her research interests include crosslinguistic semantics and pragmatics, dynamic semantics, philosophy of language, cognitive science, and language documentation. Murray is affiliated with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and is actively involved in projects related to Algonquian languages, including Cheyenne. Her work emphasizes the importance of language documentation and revitalization, contributing to the understanding of how meaning is coded in language and supporting indigenous language preservation efforts.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• The Semantics of Evidentials

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-05-17 · 107 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence m…

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• Declarative sentences

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-05-17 · 95 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 4 develops a compositional implementation of this analysis for evidentials in declarative sentences that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. In particular, I use an update semantics where both truth‐conditional content and anaphoric potential is encoded (Update with Centering). The formal implementation builds on work in dynamic semantics and the semantics of assertion and questions. This compositional, dynamic implementation integrates the different kinds of…

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• The structure of communicative acts

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2020 · 76 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
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• Evidentiality, Modality, and Speech Acts

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2020 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Evidential constructions have two main semantic effects: They contribute information about an individual's source of evidence, and they potentially modify the force of a sentence. In this article, I review the at-issue status of the evidential information, the indexical and anaphoric properties of evidentials, their force-modifying effect, and the connection throughout to epistemic modality. In some languages, evidentials occur as part of the grammatical morphology, but evidential information ca…

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• Force and Conversational States

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-08-22 · 14 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This essay sketches an approach to speech acts in which mood does not semantically determine illocutionary force. The conventional content of mood determines the semantic type of the clause in which it occurs, and, given the nature of discourse, that type most naturally lends itself to serving as a particular type of speech act, that is, to serving as one of the three basic types of language game moves-making an assertion (declarative); posing a question (interrogative); or proposing to one’s ad…

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Frequent coauthors

• Miloje Despić

  Cornell University

  3 shared

• William B. Starr

  Cornell University

  2 shared

• Michael David Hamilton

  2 shared

• Jessica Rett

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Rachel I. Vogel

  University of Minnesota

  1 shared

• Henk Zeevat

  University of Amsterdam

  1 shared

• Marianne Huijsmans

  University of British Columbia

  1 shared

• Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Klarman Fellow

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• John B. Whitmanh-27
• Abigail C Cohnh-20
• Mats Roothh-17