[GitHub] [OSF] [Dissertation]

About me

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My research focuses broadly speaking on issues around selection, and how the interpretation and distribution of different types of complements (various kinds of questions, declaratives, and nominals) are constrained across different types of embedded environments. My work also investigates questions around how different dimensions of meaning (such as presupposition, assertion, and truth-conditional meaning) are represented in the grammar and in the lexicon.

I'm also interested in how experimental and quantitative methods can be used to inform theoretical and empirical questions about meaning in language, and I teach a course on the topic.

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I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 (supervised by Florian Schwarz). In 2019-2020, I was a postdoctoral research fellow working with Maribel Romero on the semantics of questions as part of the Questions at the Interfaces project at the University of Konstanz.

I'm currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz (host: Maribel Romero). The project investigates the semantic composition, argument structure, and complementation patterns of (primarily factive) attitude reports. To address these questions, the project integrates comparative, theoretical, and experimental methods. 

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(Helpful note for referring to me: the "aj" cluster in Kajsa is pronounced like the English PRICE vowel [aɪ], and my pronouns are she/her/hers.)

Upcoming and recent events

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A preprint of my paper "Knowing and believing things: what DP-complements can tell us about the argument structure and composition of (factive) attitudes" is now available on LingBuzz

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My paper on copular sentences in Germanic and Slavic has appeared in the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics

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• Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm & Uppsala joint grammar colloquium (invited talk)

• The University of Stuttgart Research Colloquium (invited talk)

• The Edinburgh University Meaning and Grammar Research Group (invited talk)

• SALT31 (talk, handout here)

• SALT 31 (poster presentation with Maribel Romero, poster here)

• WCCFL39 (talk)

• OSU Workshop on Clause-Embedding Predicates (invited talk)

• BCGL 13: The syntax and semantics of clausal complementation (talk)

• The Newcastle University Linguistics Seminar Series (invited talk)

• The Institut Jean-Nicod, Linguae Research Seminar (invited talk, slides here)

Contact

kdjarv at sas dot upenn dot edu

Affiliations

• Questions at the Interfaces research unit at the University of Konstanz.

• Florian Schwarz's Experimental Study of Meaning Lab at the University of Pennsylvania (alumn).

• MECORE - Cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions in clausal embedding (principal investigators: Wataru Uegaki & Maribel Romero)

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