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, aspectual coercion, degree modification, adverbial quantifiers and other temporal adverbials, scalar implicature, and presupposition triggering.

I am currently a fourth-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

January 2026: I recently submitted two first-authored experimental manuscripts, both co-authored with Athulya Aravind. The first, "A cautionary note on word learning paradigms and presupposition triggering," can be found here; the second, "On aspectual coercion in before-/after-clauses: Evidence from processing," can be found here.

September 2025: My paper "On very-intensified superlatives" was published as part of the Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 29 proceedings.

July 2025: I successfully defended my second Generals Paper at MIT, entitled "On aspectual coercion in before- and after-clauses: Evidence from processing."

May 2025: I presented the poster (and lightning talk) "On aspectual coercion in before-clauses: Evidence from processing" at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 35.

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.

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