Professor of Linguistics
The Ohio State University

My main areas of specialization within linguistics are formal semantics and pragmatics. Within these fields, my principal research interests are:

• Anaphora, definiteness, and specificity. Indexicals and proper names.
• Formal models of the context of utterance and its role in interpretation: Presupposition, focus, implicature, perspective, and domain restriction
• The semantics and pragmatics of modality, mood, tense, and aspect

As a student I studied formal semantics under Barbara H. Partee at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford, where I was exposed to interdisciplinary work on pragmatics in the tradition of Paul Grice, and to work on Planning Theory in AI. Since then, my work on pragmatics has involved a dialogue with colleagues in computer science, logic, philosophy, and psychology. In this vein, I am involved in an interdisciplinary Pragmatics Initiative, involving not only scholars and graduate students from the relevant disciplines at OSU, but also other scholars from the U.S. and Europe.

Recently I've been collaborating with David Beaver, Mandy Simons, and Judith Tonhauser, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, to study Projective Meanings: presupposition, conventional implicature, and other non-assertoric aspects of utterance meaning. And I'm a member of the German Science Foundation Research Network Questions in Discourse. I'm also an Associate Editor of the journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and a member of the editorial board of Semantics and Pragmatics. During the 2014-2015 academic year, I have a Senior Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. In the summer of 2015, I'll be teaching a course on pragmatics as part of the LSA Summer Institute at the University of Chicago.

Office Hours suspended in 2014-2015.

Contact Information:
Email: croberts AT ling.osu.edu
Phone: (614) 292-8302
210 Oxley Hall
Columbus, OH 43210