jesse a. harris :: homepage

I am an assistant professor at Pomona College in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. My research concentrates on three related areas: (a) the formal semantics of context sensitive expressions, (b) the semantic processing of contextually dependent terms, and (c) the pragmatic and processing defaults engaged when interpreting perspectival information.

Past areas of research include the semantics, pragmatics, and processing of concealed questions, event structure in coordinated verb complexes, and issues in the syntax-semantics interface of relative clauses.

I received my PhD in Linguistics from UMass Amherst in early 2012. I received my Masters of Logic from the University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, served as lab manager for the NYU Neurolinguistics Lab under the direction of Liina Pylkkänen, and received a joint BA/MA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

Current courses

Introduction to Semantics: MW 11:00AM-12:15PM. Mason Room 20
Introduction to Cognitive Science: TR 09:35-10:50AM. EDMS Room 101

Current projects

Editing

Publications

Harris, Jesse A., Charles Clifton, Jr., & Lyn Frazier (accepted). Processing and domain restriction: Quantificational variability effects. Language and Cognitive Processes.

Cable, Seth & Jesse A. Harris (2011). On the Grammatical Status of PP-Pied-Piping in English: Results from Sentence-Rating Experiments. In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics: Processing Linguistic Structure. Volume 38, pp. 1 - 22. Harris & Grant (eds.) GLSA Publications, Amherst, MA.

Harris, Jesse A. & Christopher Potts (2011). Predicting perspectival orientation for appositives. In Proceedings from the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Harris, Jesse A. (2011). Extraction from Coordinate Structures: Evidence from Language Processing. In Proceedings from the 45th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Harris, Jesse A. & Christopher Potts (2009). Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. Linguistics & Philosophy 32(6):523-552.

Harris, Jesse A. (2009). Epithets and perspective shift: experimental evidence. In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers: Papers in Pragmatics. Volume 39, pp. 49 - 76. Biezma & Harris (eds.) GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.

Harris, Jesse A. (2008). On the syntax and semantics of Heim's ambiguity. in The Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. University of California, LA.

Harris, Jesse, Liina Pylkkänen, Brian McElree, & Steven Frisson (2008). The Cost of Question Concealment: Eye-tracking and MEG evidence. In Brain and Language, 107(1):44-61.

Harris, Jesse & Terry Regier (2004). The Associative Origin of Words. In Proceedings from the 38th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Andronis et al (eds.), Volume 38-1

Manuscripts

Harris, J. A. (2007). Revealing Concealment: A (Neuro-)Logical Investigation of Concealed Questions. Masters of Logic Thesis (148 pp). Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Under the supervision of Paul Dekker, Liina Pylkkänen, and Martin Stokhof.
N.B. The syntactic account of this thesis has been improved on in Harris (2008). The psycholinguistics work presented here has been published as Harris et al (2008). I am currently revising the semantics proposal. Please email me to request a copy.

Selected Presentations and Posters

Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects. (2011). Harris, J. A., Clifton, C. & Frazier, L. Poster presented at the 24th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at Stanford University.

The Pragmatics of Free Indirect Discourse: a questionnaire study. (2010). Harris, J. A. Poster presented at PEPA 2, held at the University of British Columbia.

Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives. (2009). Harris, J. A. & Potts, C. Paper presented at the OSU Workshop on Projective Meanings.

Locality, Event-Construal & Extraction: Evidence from Language Processing. (2009). Harris, J. A. Poster presented at the 22nd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, held at UC Davis.

On the Event-Extraction Correlation: Evidence from Coordinate Structures. . (2009). Harris, J. A. Presented at the Proceedings of the 45th Chicago Linguistic Society.

On the syntax and semantics of Heim's ambiguity. (2008). Harris, J. A. Presented at the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, held at UCLA.

How do you answer a concealed question? A flexible approach. (2007). Harris, J. A. Presented at Southern New England Workshop on Semantics, held at MIT.

The Interpretation of Concealed Questions. (2006). Harris, J., Pylkkänen, L., McElree, B. & and Frisson, S. Presented at the 19th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference.

The roles of the right hemisphere and the anterior midline field in semantic processing: MEG studies. (2005). Pylkkänen, L., Murphy, G. L., McElree, B., Harris, J. A., Francis, J., Martin, A. E. & Llinás, R. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

Volumes Edited

Harris, Jesse A. & Margaret Grant (2011). University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics: Processing Linguistic Structure. Volume 38. GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.

Biezma, Maria & Jesse A. Harris (2009). University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics: Papers in Pragmatics. Volume 39. GLSA Publishing. Amherst, MA.

The Embedded Appositives Corpus

Embedded appositives. An annotated collection of 278 sentences containing appositives embedded syntactically in the complement of propositional attitude predicates and verbs of saying, drawn from 177 million words of novels, newspaper articles, and TV transcripts. Intended to inform work on appositives, conventional implicatures, and textual entailment. Includes a Javascript interface, an XML corpus, and a short write-up describing the data and their theoretical relevance.

jesse a. harris