Nancy Hedberg

Background

About Nancy Hedberg

I study how aspects of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology interact in determining meaning in context. Specialties: clefts, copula sentences, prosody, questions, parentheticals, deixis, anaphora, topic, focus, metaphor. I now work on topics such as these in Hul'q'umi'num', the dialect of Halkomelem Salish spoken on Vancouver Island. RESEARCH QUESTIONS:(1) Is there an equative as well as a predicational copula in languages of the world? How are basic NP+NP sentences expressed cross linguistically? How are simple copula sentences related to complex copula sentences such as clefts?(2) Why do English speakers sometimes express wh-questions with with rising instead of falling intonation, e.g."When are you planning on coming?"​ (3) Why do English speakers sometimes end their yes-no questions in a fall instead of a rise? How is that related to whether they expect an informative answer as a response? Why does the rise sometimes seem to start high instead of low?(4) How and why do English speakers sometimes use parentheticals to change the epistemic force of their utterances midstream:"The terrorists who were in control during 911, they all had fake drivers licenses from I believe Florida."​ (6) How and why do speakers of different languages encode their references using particular linguistic forms? how and why do they choose to use particular determiner and pronominal forms in particular contexts? How and why are demonstratives used? What are definite and indefinite articles? When can noun phrases be used without any accompanying overt determiner?(7) How far can speakers stretch the meaning of their expressions and utterances through e.g. metaphor, hyperbole, and approximation in context before they cease to be speaking truthfully?