Susan D. SCHWEITZER

I am a PhD student in Linguistics at the Institut Jean Nicod / École normale supérieure in Paris. I have a Masters in Linguistics (MA) from the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Masters in Information and Library Science (MILS) from the University of Michigan.

My dissertation focuses on procedural discourse, specifically the language we use when we give instructions and describe procedures. I look at recipes, repair manuals, instructional videos, descriptions of algorithms, and other sources, both in English and other languages. I'm interested in a set of (possibly related) topics that are embodied in procedural discourse, including the use of deontic modality, anaphoric expressions and resolution, imperatives and update semantics, and the nature of procedures as objects, among others. I'm focusing on the semantics of this type of discourse, as well as its interface with syntax. My advisors are Nicholas Asher and Dominique Sportiche. Beyond my dissertation, I'm also interested in logic in general and its applications in linguistics, computational linguistics and problems in the analysis of acquisition, and the typology of pragmatic effects.