I am a recent PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University interested in whether and how the capacity for language, one of the few discrete combinatorial symbolic systems in nature, makes human beings unique. My current research is primarily in psycholinguistics and the semantics-pragmatics interface, in particular, the online processing of scalar implicature and contrastive inference. I am also interested in formal semantics, natural language processing, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan in linguistics and philosophy, focusing on the semantics and metaphysics of tense. Before coming to Harvard, I managed the 300 Languages Project at the Long Now Foundation.
