Laura Kertz

I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego. My research focuses on interactions between syntax (how what we say gets assembled piecemeal) and pragmatics (how what we say relates to a speech context). My advisor is Andrew Kehler.

My thesis research addresses the interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis. In particular, I am studying how listeners recognize parallelism in syntax and in discourse, and how interactions between the two types of processing guide interpretation.

Papers

Laura Kertz. (2008) Focus structure and acceptability in verb phrase ellipsis. In the Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, eds. Natasha Abner and Jason Bishop, 283-291. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Andrew Kehler, Laura Kertz, Hannah Rohde, and Jeff Elman. (2008) Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics Special Issue on Processing Meaning, JoS 25(1):1-44.

Laura Kertz, Andrew Kehler, and Jeff Elman. (2006) Evaluating a coherence-based model of pronoun interpretation. In the Proceedings of the Ambiguity in Anaphora Workshop, ESSLLI 2006, edited by Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio, 49-56.

Laura Kertz, Andrew Kehler, and Jeff Elman. (2006) Grammatical and coherence-based factors in pronoun interpretation. In the Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1605-1610.

Laura Kertz. (2006) Evaluative predicates: An adjunct control analysis. In the Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon, 229-235. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

recentPresentations

Laura Kertz. (2009) An experimental approach to verb phrase ellipsis. To be presented at the 12th Annual Conference of the Texas Linguistics Society. University of Texas at Austin, Nov 13-15, 2009.

Laura Kertz. (2009) Information structure and ellipsis. Presented at the First Annual Meeting of California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP). University of California, Los Angeles, May 23-24, 2009.

Farrell Ackerman, George Gibbard, Peter Jenks, Laura Kertz and Sharon Rose. (2009) The Morphosyntax of Filler-Gap Constructions in Moro. Presented at the 40th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Apr 9-11, 2009.

Farrell Ackerman, George Gibbard, Peter Jenks, Laura Kertz and Sharon Rose. (2009) Balancing Description, Typology, and Theory in Thetogovela Moro. Presented at the 40th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Apr 9-11, 2009.

Laura Kertz. (2009) Early parallelism effects in ellipsis. Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. University of California, Davis, Mar 26-28, 2009.

Laura Kertz. (2009) Ellipsis effects without ellipsis. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. San Francisco, CA, Jan 8-11, 2009.