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Research

This is me doing research.

I’m a semanticist, that is, I study natural language meaning. These days I’ve been working on scope, dynamics, and update. I talk to linguists, philosophers of language, and computer scientists, and I’m especially interested in adapting techniques from functional programming such as functors, monads, and continuations.

• Recent projects:
  • Composing local contexts: This is a newly revised version of a paper I drafted in 2008. It uses an innovative continuation-passing style transform to provide a minimal dynamic semantics on which dynamic effects depend only on truth conditions and order of evaluation.
  • Rethinking scope islands. 2021. Linguistic Inquiry. Contrary to the standard wisdom, abundant naturally-occuring data shows that clauses are not scope islands. Preprint; preprint and Haskell code available here.
  • The logic of Quantifier Raising. 2020. Semantics and Pragmatics, 13.20. The first study of the formal properties of Quantifier Raising. I show that QR is decidable, even in the presence of unrestricted type lifting. Surprisingly, QR with type lifting validates Hendriks’ Flexible Montague Grammar type shifters.
  • NL-lambda as the Logic of Scope and Movement. 2019. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 28, 217–237. Decidability, interpolation, and soundness and completeness proofs for a logic with Quantifier Raising and a unit, which can characterize both overt and covert movement.
• Selected Works:
  • Negative polarity as scope marking. 2018. Linguistics and Philosophy 41.5: 483–510. doi:10.1007/s10988-018-9234-2
  • Why relational nominals make good concealed questions. 2016. Lingua 182: 12–29. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2016.01.002
  • Scope. In Shalom Lappin and Chris Fox (eds). 2015. The Handbook of Contemporary Semantics, 2d edition. Wiley-Blackwell. 47–87. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch2
  • Barker, Chris and Chung-chieh Shan. 2014. Continuations and Natural Language. Oxford University Press.
  • Bumford, Dylan and Chris Barker. 2013. Association with distributivity and the problem of multiple antecedents for singular different. Linguistics and Philosophy 36.5: 355–369. doi:10.1007/s10988-013-9139-z
  • Scopability and Sluicing. 2013. Linguistics and Philosophy. 36.3:187–223. doi:10.1007/s10988-013-9137-1
  • Negotiating taste. Inquiry 56.2–3: 240–257. doi:10.1080/0020174x.2013.784482
  • Quantificational binding does not require c-command. 2012. Linguistic Inquiry 43.4: 614–633. doi:10.1162/ling_a_00108.
  • Imperatives denote actions. 2012. In Ana Aguilar Guevara, Anna Chernilovskaya, and Rick Nouwen (eds). Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16, Volume 1. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. 57–70
  • Possessives and relational nouns. 2011. In von Heusinger, Maienborn, and Portner (eds). Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. HSK 33.2 (Volume 2). Berlin: de Gruyter. 1108-–1129. doi:10.1515/9783110255072.1109.
  • Free choice permission as resource-sensitive reasoning. 2010. Semantics and Pragmatics 3.10: 1–38. doi:10.3765/sp.3.10
  • Cosubstitution, derivational locality, and quantifier scope. 2010. Proceedings of TAG+10: The 10th International Conference on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms.
  • Clarity and the grammar of skepticism. Mind and Language 24.3: 253–273. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01362.x
  • Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1.1: 1–42. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1
  • Parasitic Scope. 2007. Linguistics and Philosophy. 30.4: 407–444. doi:10.1007/s10988-007-9021-y
  • Direct Compositionality on Demand. 2007. In Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). Direct Compositionality. Oxford University Press. 102–131.
  • Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson. 2007. Introduction: Direct Compositionality. In Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). Direct Compositionality. Oxford University Press.
  • Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). 2007. Direct Compositionality. Oxford University Press.
  • Possessive weak definites. 2005. In Kim, Ji-yung, Lander, Yury, and Partee, Barbara H. (eds). Possessives and Beyond: Semantics and Syntax. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications. 89–113.
  • Continuations in Natural Language. In Hayo Thielecke (ed). Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGPLAN Continuations Workshop (CW’04). Technical Report CSR-04-1, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom. 1–11. [Written for computer scientists]
  • Continuations and the nature of quantification. 2002. Natural Language Semantics 10.3:211–242. doi:10.1023/a:1022183511876
  • The Dynamics of Vagueness. 2002. Linguistics and Philosophy 25.1:1–36. doi:10.1023/a:1014346114955
  • Individuation and Quantification. 1999. Linguistic Inquiry 30.4:683–691. doi:10.1162/002438999554264
  • Partitives, Double Genitives, and Anti-uniqueness. 1998. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16:679–717. doi:10.1023/a:1005917421076
  • Episodic -ee in English: A thematic role constraint on new word formation. 1998. Language 74.4:695–727. doi:10.2307/417000
  • Presuppositions for Proportional Quantifiers. 1996. Natural Language Semantics 4:237–259. doi:10.1007/bf00372821
  • Possessive Descriptions. 1995. CSLI Press.
  • Chris Barker and David Dowty. 1993. Non-verbal thematic proto-roles. Proceedings of NELS 23, Amy Schafer (ed). GSLA, Amherst, 49–62.
  • Group terms in English: representing groups as atoms. 1992. Journal of Semantics 9: 69–93. doi:10.1093/jos/9.1.69