Johanna Alstott

jalstott@mit.edu

I'm a semanticist who uses formal and experimental methods to investigate how natural languages construct meanings related to order, degrees, and time. Topics I have written on include ordinal numbers, superlatives, scale structure, adverbial quantifiers and other temporal adverbials, and scalar implicature.

I am currently a second-year PhD student in Linguistics at MIT. Before arriving at MIT, I got my B.A. in Linguistics at Harvard College, where I graduated summa cum laude with a thesis on scalar implicature supervised by Kathryn Davidson.

News

February 2024: My first-authored abstract "Comparing the processing of two types of durative-to-punctual coercion" (joint work with Athulya Aravind) was accepted as a poster at the 37th Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP).

January 2024: I presented the talk "Before and after decomposing first and last" at the 54th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS).

January 2024: My paper "Ordinal numbers: Not superlatives, but modifiers of superlatives" was published by the Linguistic Society of America in the Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 33 proceedings.

January 2024: I presented the talk "A first semantics for at first and at last" at the 2024 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

November 2023: My abstract "Before and after decomposing first and last" was accepted as a talk at the 54th Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society.

September 2023: My abstract "A first semantics for at first and at last" was accepted as a talk at the 2024 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

July 2023: I attended the 5th Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, where I served as a TA for "Introduction to Semantics" with instructor Cleo Condoravdi.

June 2023: I presented the poster "Scalar implicature in adverbial vs. nominal quantifiers: Two experiments" at the 49th Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, University of Pittsburgh.

May 2023: I presented the poster "Ordinal numbers: Not superlatives, but modifiers of superlatives" at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 33, Yale University.

April 2023: I presented the poster "Scalar implicature in adverbial vs. nominal quantifiers: Two experiments" at the 59th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago.