I am a Professor in the Linguistics and Philosophy Departments at The University of Texas at Austin, and Director of the Cognitive Science Program.

My research and teaching concerns linguistic meaning, an area traditionally subdivided into two subfields, semantics and pragmatics. The methodologies I use include computational studies of large corpora of text, experimental work, and theoretical modeling using tools from logic and statistics. The main empirical topics I have worked on are presupposition (how what we take for granted is reflected in what we say), anaphora (how words like pronouns pick up their meaning from prior context), and topic/focus (the way that we use melody and other linguistic features to indicate what question is being addressed and what the answer is). I also have interests in temporal and event semantics, in the automatic extraction of psychological and social features in text and dialogue, and in broader philosophical, psychological and computational themes from cognitive science.