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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My paper "Knowing and believing things: what DP-complements can tell us about the argument structure and composition of (factive) attitudes" has been accepted, pending minor revisions, at the Journal of Semantics. A preprint is 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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Invited talks 

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• UCL Semantics Seminar

• The University of Stuttgart Research Colloquium

• MECORE kickoff workshop: Approaches to the semantics of clause-embedding predicates: theories, cross-linguistic data, and experimentation 

  • talk on root phenomena and complex assertions (pdf)

  • joint talk with Maribel Romero on exhaustivity in question-embedding (pdf)

• Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm & Uppsala Grammar Seminar

• The Edinburgh University Meaning and Grammar Research Group

• OSU Workshop on Clause-Embedding Predicates 

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Conference presentations

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• SALT 31 (single-authored talk, handout here & poster with Maribel Romero, poster here)

• WCCFL 39 (talk)

 

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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