Heather Burnett

Chercheur CNRS

Présentation générale

My work involves describing new patterns of structure, meaning and communication in natural languages, and then developing new mathematical tools for analyzing them.

Much of my research has focused on classic topics in natural language semantics, such as quantification, vagueness, gradability and negation; however, my more recent work studies properties of social meaning and sociolinguistic variation with a view to constructing an empirically well-founded, mathematically explicit and computationally implemented theory of identity construction through language. So far, my work in this area has been centred around the linguistic construction of regional, gender and sexual identity in France and Canada.

Although the tools and frameworks that I develop aim to capture aspects of the full range of human languages, my theoretical ideas are often first informed by my own dialectological and sociolinguistic fieldwork studies of languages of the Gallo-Romance family: varieties of French spoken in Canada and in France, historical varieties of French (particularly Old and Middle French), and endangered Gallo-Romance languages, both Oïl varieties (esp. Picard and Normand) and Occitan varieties (esp. Languedocien and Limousin). 

Projets de recherche

Labex EFL Opération SA4: Near Synonymy, Semantic Equivalence and Syntactic Variation (with B. Gehrke (LLF) & T. Nikitina (LLACAN))

SSHRC Insight Development grant: Variation et diglossie: Corpus et modélisation (collaborator, with M. Tremblay (Montréal) and H. Blondeau (Florida))

Procope grant "Many to One", Paris-Frankfurt.

Procope grant "ETAPS", Paris-Berlin.

Enseignement

B06: Langues naturelles, langages formels, in the Département d'Études Cognitives, ENS Paris (with S. Mascarenhas). Spring 2017.

Bibliographie

Books

Burnett, Heather. (2016).  Gradability in Natural Language: Logical and Grammatical Foundations.  Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Journal articles

Burnett, Heather, Hilda Koopman and Sali Tagliamonte. (accepted). "Soft Syntax and the Evolution of Negative Quantifiers in the History of English". accepted in  Language Variation and Change.

Burnett, Heather. (accepted). "Signalling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style". accepted in  Linguistics & Philosophy.

Burnett, Heather. (2017). "Sociolinguistic Interaction and Identity Construction: The View from Game-Theoretic Pragmatics." Journal of Sociolinguistics.  22:1. 238-271.

Burnett, Heather. (2016). "Variation as a Testing Ground for Grammatical Theory: Variable Negative Concord in Montréal French".  Linguistic Variation. 16: 267-299. 

Burnett, Heather. (2015). "Comparison Across Domains in Delineation Semantics." Journal of Logic, Language and Information.  24:233-265.

Burnett, Heather. (2014). "A Delineation Solution to the Puzzles of Absolute Adjectives." Linguistics & Philosophy. 37:1-39. 

Burnett, Heather. (2014). "Penumbral Connections in Comparative Construction." Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics. 24:35-60.

Troberg, Michelle & Heather Burnett. (2014). "Le prédicat résultatif adjectival en français médiéval." Lingvisticae Investigationes.  37: 152-176.

Burnett, Heather. (2012). "The Role of Microvariation in the Study of Semantic Universals: Adverbial Quantifiers in European and Québec French." Journal of Semantics. 29:1-38.


Book chapters

Burnett, Heather. & Eric McCready (forthcoming). "Social Implicatures." in Claire Beyssade (ed.). Implicatures.  in the series  Foundational Concepts in the Philosophy of Language.​ ISTE Publications.

Burnett, Heather. & Peter Sutton. (accepted). "Vagueness and Natural Language Semantics."  to appear in L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann and T.E. Zimmermann (eds.).  Companion to Semantics.  Wiley's Linguistics Companion Series.

Caudal, Patrick, Heather Burnett & Michelle Troberg. (2016) Les facteurs de choix de l'auxiliaire en ancien français: étude qualitative et quantitative. in Benjamin Fagard and Sophie Prévost (eds.). Le français en diachronie. Dépendances syntaxiques, Morphosyntaxe verbale, Grammaticalisation. Berne : Peter Lang.

Michelle Troberg & Heather Burnett. (2016). "From Latin to Modern French: A Punctuated Shift." in press for E. Mathieu & R. Truswell (eds.). From Micro-Change to Macro-Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burnett, Heather. & Michelle Troberg. (2014). "On the Diachronic Semantics of Resultative Constructions in the History of French." in C. Pinon (ed.). Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 10.  ISSN 1769-7158. pp. 37-52.

Burnett, Heather & Mireille Tremblay. (2014). "L'expression de la négation en français québécois: pantoute, polarité et mots-N." in Wim Remysen et al. (eds). Les français d'ici: du discours de l'autorité à la description des normes et des usages. Presses universitaires de Laval. pp. 261-290.

Burnett, Heather. (2013). "Structure événementielle et modification pragmatique: On connait-tu tout sur /tUt/?" in Davy Bigot, Michael Friesner and Mireille Tremblay (eds). Les français d'ici et d'aujourd'hui: Description, représentation et théorisation. Presses universitaires de Laval. pp. 211-230. 

Burnett, Heather. (2012). "Vague Determiner Phrases and Distributive Predication." in Marija Slavkovik and Dan Lassiter (eds.) New Directions in Logic, Language, and Interaction. Springer: FoLLI Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7415. pp. 175-194. 

Burnett, Heather & Mireille Tremblay. (2012). “Change in the Encoding of Direction in the History of French: A Quantitative Approach to Argument Structure Change.” in Nynke de Haas & Ans van Kemenade (eds.) Historical Linguistics 2009. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Burnett, Heather & Mireille Tremblay. (2012). ``Directionalité et aspect en ancien français: l'apport du système prépositionnel." in Mario Barra-Jover et al. (eds). Études de linguistique gallo-romane. Presses de l'Université de Vincennes. pp. 217-232. 

Burnett, Heather & Mireille Tremblay. (2012). "An Extra-Strong NPI?  Pantoute  in Québec French." in Thomas Graf, Denis Paperno, Anna Szabolsci & Jos Tellings (eds.) Theories of Everything: In Honor of Ed Keenan. UCLA Working Papers 17. pp. 35-42.

Bouchard, David-Étienne, Heather Burnett and Daniel Valois. (2012). "Degree Fronting in Québec French and the Syntactic Structure of Degree Quantifier DPs." in Berns, Janine, Haike Jacobs, and Tobias Scheer (eds.) Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 39-54. 

Burnett, Heather. (2010). "Pitch Accent, Focus, and the Interpretation of Non-WH Exclamatives in French." in  Sonia Colina at al. (eds) Romance Linguistics 2009. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 369-386. 

Bouchard, David-Étienne & Heather Burnett. (2010). “La quantification et l’intensification a distance en français québécois.” in Carmen Leblanc et al. (eds). ´ Vues sur les français d’ici. Quebec: Presses Universitaires de Laval. pp. 31-48. 
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Burnett, Heather & Mireille Tremblay. (2009). "Variable Behaviour Ps and the Location of PATH in Old French." in Enoch Aboh et al. (eds) Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2007. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: pages 25-50. 

Conference Proceedings

​Burnett, Heather & Anne Dagnac. (2016). Concordance négative optionnelle: contrastes forts et faibles entre picard et québécois. Pre-proceedings of the 5th Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française. Université François Rabelais. Tours, France.

Burnett, Heather, Mireille Tremblay & Hélène Blondeau. (2015). "The Variable Grammar of Montréal French Negative Concord." in S. Fischer (ed.) Selected Papers from NWAV 43. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 21 (2). 

​Burnett, Heather. (2015). "Mereological Delineation Semantics and Quantity Comparatives." in L. Moss et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd Natural Language and Computer Science Workshop (NLCS2). University of Coimbra Technical Report. 

Burnett, Heather. (2014). ``From Quantification and Intensification to Slack Regulation: Adjectival ALL." in M. Pham et al. (eds). Proceedings of the 48th meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS48). Chicago: CLS Publications.

Burnett, Heather. (2013). ``A Pragmatic Solution to the Paradox of Absolute Adjectives." in Emmanuel Chemla, Vincent Homer and Grégoire Winterstein (eds.). Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17 (SuB17). Ecole normale supérieure, Paris. pp.149-166. 

Burnett, Heather. (2012). ``(A)Symmetric Vagueness and the Absolute/Relative Distinction." in A. Aguilar, A. Chernilovskaya, and R. Nowen (eds). Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16 (SuB16). MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.

Burnett, Heather. (2012). "A Multi-Valued Delineation Semantics for Absolute Adjectives." in Paul Égré and David Ripley (eds.) Proceedings of the workshop on Three-Valued Logics and their Applications at ESSLLI 2012. Opole, Poland. pp. 1-17.

Burnett, Heather. (2011). ``Vagueness and Plural Predication." in Dan Lassiter (ed.) Proceedings of the 2011 ESSLLI Student Session. Ljubljana, Slovenia. (Superseded by "Vague Determiner Phrases and Distributive Predication" above.)

Burnett, Heather. (2011). "A Unified Semantic Analysis of the Licensing Conditions of 'Bare' Indefinites in French". in Mary Byram et al. (eds). Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL28). Cascadilla Press. pp. 78-86.

Burnett, Heather. (2010). "Adverbial Quantification and (Un)Reducibility: The Quantification at a Distance Construction in French." in Viola Schmitt & Sarah Zobel (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 14 (SuB14). University of Vienna. pp. 67-83. link

Burnett, Heather, Geneviève Gauthier & Mireille Tremblay. (2010). "La perte des particules arriere et avant en français médiéval: étude quantitative." in the Proceedings of the 2nd Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française. New Orleans, USA. pp. 125-136.

Burnett, Heather & David-Étienne Bouchard. (2009). "Optionality in the Mode of Composition and Interpretation of Noun Phrases." in Martin Walkow (ed). Proceedings of the 38th North East Linguistics Society (NELS38). GLSA, UMass, Amherst. pp. 151-164.

Burnett, Heather.(2006). "On the Status of Proper Names in the Grammar." in Claire Gurski and Milica Radisic (eds.)Proceedings of the 2006 Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association.

Burnett, Heather, Katrina Petrik & Mireille Tremblay. (2005). "La grammaire des particules en ancien français: sémantique, distribution et perte de productivité." in Claire Gurski (ed). Proceedings of the 2005 Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association.


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