Chris Kennedy
Professor and Chair
Department of Linguistics
Classics 314D
1010 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: (773) 834-1988
http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy
ck@uchicago.edu
At the most general level, my work is geared towards discovering the principles that are involved in relating linguistic forms to meanings, determining how properties of the linguistic system and properties of the context of utterance interact in achieving this mapping, and understanding the extent to which structural and typological features of language can be explained in terms of meaning. Over the past ten years, I have investigated these issues primarily through an exploration of expressions of comparison, amount and degree, and through work on vagueness, though my research has also touched on core issues in the syntax-semantics interface such as ellipsis, anaphora, and quantification.
Education
- PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997
- MA, Yale University, 1992
- BA, Dartmouth College, 1989
Recent Publications
- Kennedy, C. and L. McNally. To appear. "Color, Context and Compositionality". Synthese.
- Kennedy, C. and J. Stanley. 2009. "On 'Average'". Mind 118:583-646.
- Kennedy, C. and B. Levin. 2008. "Telicity Corresponds to Degree of Change", in McNally, L. and C. Kennedy (eds.), Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Kennedy, C. 2007. "Modes of Comparison." In Elliot, M., J. Kirby, O. Sawada, E. Staraki and S. Yoon (eds), Papers from the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
- Kennedy, C. 2007 "Vagueness and Grammar: The Semantics of Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives", Linguistics and Philosophy 30.1.
- Kennedy, C. and L. McNally. 2005. "Scale Structure and the Semantic Typology of Gradable Predicates". Language 81.2.