•  9
    This book answers both the 'what' and the 'why' question raised by indexical shift in crosslinguistic perspective. What are the possible profiles of an indexical shifting language, and why do we find these profiles and not various equally conceivable others? Drawing both from the literature (published and unpublished) and from original fieldwork on the language Nez Perce, Amy Rose Deal puts forward several major generalizations about indexical shift crosslinguistically and present a theory that …Read more
  •  35
    Events in Space
    Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVIII. 2009.
    This paper presents a system of verb marking for spatial relations which is similar in various respects to tense marking. Evidence comes from the language Nez Perce.
  •  1144
    Modals without scales
    Language 87 (3): 559-585. 2011.
    Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o’qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o’qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implicatures. O’qa is a possibil…Read more
  •  54
    The Nez Perce counterparts of `I', `you', and `here' show "shifty" behavior in attitude reports. I argue that this is not the result of mixed quotation or binding, and should be analyzed via Anand and Nevins-style context shift with Kaplanian monsters.
  •  27
    Countability distinctions and semantic variation
    Natural Language Semantics 25 (2): 125-171. 2017.
    To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions—in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a language where all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural contrasts, countability distinctions still emerge on close inspection. I divide these distinctions into those r…Read more