(Last update: November 2023)
Amir Ahmad Anvari | Linguistics & Philosophy, MIT
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My Latest CV.
I am a tenure-track assistant professor of linguistics at MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
I am a semanticist, meaning I build on insights from mathematical logic and generative syntax in order to “deduce the laws of the symbols of Logic from a consideration of those operations of the mind which are implied in the strict use of language as an instrument of reasoning” and communication (George Boole, An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, 1854).
My partner is a fancy ex-physicist and current earth system scientist. To her, I look like this.
aanvari α mit.edu
MIT Linguistics and Philosophy
77 Massachusetts Avenue, 32-D808
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Spring 2024:
24.973 Advanced Semantics (with Viola Schmitt)
Fall 2023:
24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistics Theory (with Danny Fox)
24.979 Topics in Semantics: On indefinites
Intensive Background Building: Semantics (For two weeks at the beginning of the semester)
Spring 2023:
24.973 Advanced Semantics (with Kai von Fintel)
24.979 Topics in Semantics: On meta-semantics (with Kai von Fintel)
Fall 2022:
24.970 Introduction to Semantics (with Martin Hackl)
Spring 2022:
24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistics Theory (with Danny Fox)
* Papers can also be accessed on
LingBuzz,
Semantics Archive, and
Google Scholar.
* Authors listed alphabetically unless otherwise indicated.
Anvari, A. and Blumberg, K. (to appear) Subclausal Local Contexts. Journal of Semantics.
URL: lingbuzz/005626.
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One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Schlenker, 2009; Ingason, 2016; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically, we focus on the local contexts of quantificational determiners, e.g. ‘all’, ‘both’, etc. Our central tool for probing the local contexts of subclausal elements is the principle Maximize Presupposition! (Percus, 2006; Singh, 2011). The empirical basis of our investigation concerns some data discussed by Anvari (2018b), e.g. the fact that sentences such as ‘All of the two presidential candidates are crooked’ are unacceptable. In order to explain this, we suggest that the local context of determiners needs to contain the information carried by their restrictor. However, no existing non-stipulative account predicts this. Consequently, we think that the local contexts of subclausal expressions will likely have to be stipulated. This result has important consequences for debates in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. those around the so-called “explanatory problem” for dynamic semantics (Soames, 1982; Heim, 1990; Schlenker, 2009).
Anvari, A. (2019) The Ban Against Illeism and Indexical Shift in Farsi. manuscript, submitted.
URL: lingbuzz/004823.
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Illeism, the act of referring to oneself, and by extension the addressee, using a third person noun phrase, is usually infelicitous. One salient explanation of this "Ban Against Illeism" is that third person noun phrases compete with indexical (i.e., first or second person) pronouns and the latter are preferred if they convey the same meaning, which happens in particular when third person noun phrases refer to the actual speaker / addressee. This explanation predicts an interaction between (in-)felicity of illeism and "indexical shift" (Deal 2017 for a recent survey). Specifically, we predict that in an environment in which indexical shift is obligatory, using a third person noun phrase to refer to the actual speaker / addressee is acceptable. Building on data from Farsi, I will use the Shift Together constraint on indexical shift (Anand & Nevins 2004, Anand 2006) to construct environments in which indexical shift is obligatory, and I will provide evidence that this prediction is indeed correct. I will then argue that, at least in Farsi, another generalization holds which is the mirror-image of the first one: in an environment in which indexical shift is obligatory, using a third person noun phrase to refer to the reported speaker / addrressee is not acceptable. To capture this second generalization, a modification is required to make sure that the principle is "blind" to the de re / de se distinction. By modifying the principle to check for covaluation of referential noun phrases (as opposed to contextual equivalence of sentences), I will argue that Sharvit's (2010) notion of "type-II covaluation" can be used to solved this problem. The data set explored here constrains the space of possible analyses of indexical shift: I will argue that while the operator-based approach of indexical shift (Anand & Nevins 2004, Anand 2006) captures the relevant data without further ado, the same cannot be said for the most straightforward implementations of the binding-based approach (Schlenker 1999, and subsequent work). Finally, I will provide evidence that the two generalizations mentioned above apply, not only to indexical pronouns and third person noun phrases, but also indexical locative and temporal adverbials and their non-indexical counterparts.
Anvari, A., Maldonado, M., and Soria, A. (2019). The Puzzle of Reflexive Belief in Spanish. In M. T. Espinal, E. Castroviejo, M. Leonetti, L. McNally, and C. Real-Puigdollers (eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Sinn und Bedeutung Conference, pp. 57-74. URL: lingbuzz/004470.
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The Reflexive Belief Construction in Spanish, built by adjoining the reflexive pronoun "se" to the verb "creer" (believe), displays a puzzling interpretive behavior. When unembedded, "creerse" triggers the inference that its complement clause is false. When embedded under negation, it triggers the inference that its complement clause is true. We first argue that the negative inference in the unembedded case is not due to the Maximize Presupposition! principle (Heim 1991), carving out the empirical profile of "creerse" along the way. We then explore two alternative explanations. The first is that "creerse" presupposes the falsity of its complement. The second is that "creerse" presupposes that the attitude holder is wrongly opinionated with respect to the embedded proposition. We argue that the first analysis fails unless it is supplemented with the syntactic account of neg-raising (Collins and Postal 2014), whereas the second analysis faces empirical challenges. We leave the resolution of this dilemma to future work.
Anvari, A. (2018). Logical Integrity. In S. Maspong, B. Stefánsdóttir, K. Blake, and F. Davis (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (SALT 28), pp. 711-726. doi: 10.3765/salt.v28i0.4419. URL: lingbuzz/005626.
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Building on previous literature I argue that the principle Maximize Presupposition! as standardly conceived is too permissive in that it sanctions certain utterances that are intuitively infelicitous. I propose as an alternative to MP a novel principle called Logical Integrity and I showed that while LI makes the same prediction as MP for the basic cases it is restrictive enough to account for the problematic cases discussed. Furthermore, I argue that LI without further ado make interesting predictions for a novel type of example, the cases discussed in Magri (2009), and Hurford's Constraint. Finally, I discuss and defused one potential counter-example to LI.
Anvari, A. (2018). A problem for Maximize Presupposition! (locally). Snippets 33, pp. 1-2. doi: 10.7358/snip-2018-033-anva. URL: https://www.ledonline.it/snippets/allegati/snippets33001.pdf.
Anvari, A. (2018) Logical Integrity: from Maximize Presupposition! to Mismatching Implicatures. manuscript, submitted.
URL: lingbuzz/003866.
Anvari, A. (2017). Dislocated Cosuppositions. In A. Cremers, T. van Gessel, and F. Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, pp. 106–114. URL: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jZiM2FhZ/AC2017-Proceedings.pdf.