I am a Professor of Semantics and Pragmatics at the University of Oxford, a Tutorial Fellow in Linguistics at Jesus College and a Lecturer at Brasenose College. I studied at UCLA, where I got a BA in philosophy, with a minor in linguistics. I got my PhD in linguistics from Rutgers University, with a certificate in cognitive science.

I was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Hampshire College from 2010-2011 and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College from 2011-2012. For three years thereafter, I was an Assistant Professor of Semantics at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf before coming back to Hampshire College, where I was promoted to an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the School of Cognitive Science. I joined Jesus and Brasenose College in July 2020.

I teach and supervise students in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. Semantics and pragmatics are a core component of two Oxford courses of study: Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics (PPL) and Modern Languages and Linguistics (MLL).

For more information, please see: https://danielaltshuler.com/pedagogy

My primary research interests are in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. The theme of my research is context dependence with the aim of better understanding how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence. My first monograph, “Events, States and Times” (2016, De Gruyter), investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse through focused case studies of temporal adverbials, coherence relations, tense and aspect. Currently I am writing a book (under contract with OUP) called: “Discourse interpretation: A formal theory of coherence relations”.

My second monograph, “Coordination and the Syntax-Discourse Interface” (OUP, 2022), explores interactions between syntactic structure and discourse structure, through a focused case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. Currently I’m working on coordinate structures in under-studied and under-represented languages, focusing on clause linkage, switch reference and non-iconic doubling.

I am also the editor of “Linguistics meets Philosophy” (CUP, 2022), which empowers new conversations between linguists and philosophers by showing how far formal semantics has come because of the conversations between the two disciplines, and critically assessing prior conversations, those currently taking place and those in a dire need of happening. My current research explores how literary discourse motivates particular extensions of dynamic-semantic frameworks. In particular, I have been exploring imaginative resistance and narrative frustration. Moreover, I have been working on experimentally testing reanalysis in discourse comprehension, and on analysing discourse garden path in the French novella, “Sylvie”. Currently, I am writing a book (under contract with Routledge) called: “Literature as a formal language”. I am also co-editing “The Routledge Handbook of Crosslinguistic Semantics” (under contract), which will explore crosslinguistic variation and the absence thereof in four different components of the grammar that contribute to the construction of meaning: lexicon, syntactic structure, a set of composition principles, and context.

https://danielaltshuler.com/research