cb125
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.
Selected works:
2026 Scope. To appear in Annual Review of Linguistics.
2022 Composing local contexts. Journal of Semantics.
2021 Rethinking scope islands. Linguistic Inquiry.
2022 The logic of Quantifier Raising. Semantics and Pragmatics, 13.20.
2029 NL-lambda as the Logic of Scope and Movement. 2019. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 28: 217–237.
2018 Negative polarity as scope marking. Linguistics and Philosophy 41.5: 483–510. doi:10.1007/s10988-018-9234-2
2016 Why relational nominals make good concealed questions. Lingua 182: 12–29. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2016.01.002
2015 Scope. In Shalom Lappin and Chris Fox (eds). The Handbook of Contemporary Semantics, 2d edition. Wiley-Blackwell. 47–87. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch2
2014 Barker, Chris and Chung-chieh Shan. Continuations and Natural Language. Oxford University Press.
2013 Bumford, Dylan and Chris Barker. 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
2013 Scopability and Sluicing. Linguistics and Philosophy. 36.3:187–223. doi:10.1007/s10988-013-9137-1
2013 Negotiating taste. Inquiry 56.2–3: 240–257. doi:10.1080/0020174x.2013.784482
2012 Quantificational binding does not require c-command. Linguistic Inquiry 43.4: 614–633. doi:10.1162/ling_a_00108.
2012 Imperatives denote actions. 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
2011 Possessives and relational nouns. 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.
2010 Free choice permission as resource-sensitive reasoning. Semantics and Pragmatics 3.10: 1–38. doi:10.3765/sp.3.10
2020 Cosubstitution, derivational locality, and quantifier scope. Proceedings of TAG+10: The 10th International Conference on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms.
2013 Clarity and the grammar of skepticism. Mind and Language 24.3: 253–273. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01362.x
2008 Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1.1: 1–42. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1
2007 Parasitic Scope. Linguistics and Philosophy. 30.4: 407–444. doi:10.1007/s10988-007-9021-y
2007 Direct Compositionality on Demand. In Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). Direct Compositionality. Oxford University Press. 102–131.
2007 Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson. Introduction: Direct Compositionality. In Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). Direct Compositionality. Oxford University Press.
2007 Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson (eds). Direct Compositionality. Oxford University Press.
2005 Possessive weak definites. In Kim, Ji-yung, Lander, Yury, and Partee, Barbara H. (eds). Possessives and Beyond: Semantics and Syntax. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications. 89–113.
2004 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]
2002 Continuations and the nature of quantification. Natural Language Semantics 10.3:211–242. doi:10.1023/a:1022183511876
2002 The Dynamics of Vagueness. Linguistics and Philosophy 25.1:1–36. doi:10.1023/a:1014346114955
1999 Individuation and Quantification. Linguistic Inquiry 30.4:683–691. doi:10.1162/002438999554264
1998 Partitives, Double Genitives, and Anti-uniqueness. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16:679–717. doi:10.1023/a:1005917421076
1998 Episodic -ee in English: A thematic role constraint on new word formation. Language 74.4:695–727. doi:10.2307/417000
1996 Presuppositions for Proportional Quantifiers. Natural Language Semantics 4:237–259. doi:10.1007/bf00372821
1995 Possessive Descriptions. CSLI Press.
1993 Chris Barker and David Dowty. Non-verbal thematic proto-roles. Proceedings of NELS 23, Amy Schafer (ed). GSLA, Amherst, 49–62.
1992 Group terms in English: representing groups as atoms. Journal of Semantics 9: 69–93. doi:10.1093/jos/9.1.69
This is me doing research:
