Johanna Alstott
Johanna Alstott
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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
News
July 2026: Athulya Aravind and I revised and resubmitted our paper "On aspectual coercion in before-/after-clauses: Evidence from processing." The new version can be found here.
July 2026: I attended the 7th Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, where I served as a TA for the course "Formal Pragmatics" with instructors Donka Farkas and Paul Portner.
June 2026: Athulya Aravind and I revised and resubmitted our paper "Assessing the evidence for presupposition triggering in artificial word learning experiments"—originally titled "A cautionary note on word learning paradigms and presupposition triggering." The new version can be found here.
June 2026: My paper "On aspectual coercion in before-clauses: Evidence from processing" was published by the Linguistic Society of America as part of the Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 35 proceedings.
April 2026: I presented the talk "Next" at the 62nd meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS).
March 2026: My abstract "Next" was accepted as a talk at the 62nd meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS).
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."
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