Johanna Alstott

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, before- and after-clauses, scale structure, degree modification, adverbial quantifiers and other temporal adverbials, and scalar implicature.

I am currently a third-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.

I pronounce my name as /dʒoʊ.æ.nə ɒl.stɑt/. The first syllable in my last name should be identical to the word all, however you pronounce it.

News

February 2025: My abstract "On aspectual coercion in before-clauses: Evidence from processing" was accepted as a poster (and lightning talk) at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 35.

January 2025: My paper "First and last as superlatives of before and after" was published in Natural Language Semantics.

January 2025: I presented the talk "Deriving 'first' and 'last' from 'before' and 'after': Evidence from Kinyarwanda" at the 2025 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

December 2024: My paper "Scalar implicature in adverbial vs. nominal quantifiers: Two experiments" was published by the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) in the CLS 59 proceedings.

September 2024: My abstract "Deriving 'first' and 'last' from 'before' and 'after': Evidence from Kinyarwanda" was accepted as a talk at the 2025 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

September 2024: I presented the poster (and lightning talk) "On very-intensified superlatives" at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29.

July 2024: I attended the 6th Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, where I served as a TA for "Intermediate Semantics" with instructors Rajesh Bhatt and Yael Sharvit.

June 2024: My abstract "On very-intensified superlatives" was accepted as a poster (and Alternate Talk) at Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29.

May 2024: I presented the poster "Comparing the processing of two types of durative-to-punctual coercion" (joint work with Athulya Aravind) at the 37th Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP).

May 2024: My paper "A first semantics for at first and at last" was published in the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9(1).

May 2024: I successfully defended my first Generals Paper at MIT, entitled "Before and after decomposing first and last."

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).

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