gunde003@umn.edu

612-624-7564

Program in Linguistics

My principle research and teaching interests are in pragmatics and linguistic theory. The general question that drives my research is 'what do we know when we know a language' and, in that sense, my perspective is cognitive and Chomskian. Most of my work is focused on the interface between knowledge of language (i.e. grammatical knowledge) , and other systems that govern human cognition and interaction, including the production and interpretation of language.

Within this context, I have investigated information structure (the topic-comment partition) and its interaction with the syntax of natural languages and, more recently, referring expressions. My most current work is concerned with how articles, demonstratives, and pronouns contribute to reference understanding by encoding information about the addressee`s knowledge/memory and attention state. I am especially interested in sorting out those aspects of reference production and understanding that are `grammar-driven` from those that are driven by more general pragmatic principles.

Selected Publications

"Definite descriptions and cognitive status in English: why accommodation is unnecessary." Journal of English Language and Linguistics, 2001. In press. (with N. Hedberg and R. Zacharski).

"On three kinds of focus." In P. Bosch and R. van der Sandt, eds., Focus. Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

"Centering theory and the givenness hierarchy: A proposed synthesis." In M. A. Walker, A. K. Joshi, and E. Prince, eds. Centering Theory in Discourse. Oxford University Press, 1998.

"Reference and scalar implicatures" Pragmatics and Cognition. Special issue on the Concept of Reference in the Cognitive Sciences, 1998 (with A. Mulkern).

"Relevance theory meets the givenness hierarchy: an account of inferrables. In T. Fretheim and J. Gundel, eds. Reference and Referent Accessibility. John Benjamins, 1996.

"Cognitive Status and the form of referring expressions in discourse." Language 69.2, 1993 (with N. Hedberg and R. Zacharski).

"Shared knowledge and topicality." Journal of Pragmatics 9, 1985.