Ohio State University, 2025.
An investigation of the meaning of English positive-polarity additive expressions, including both formal semantic/pragmatic analysis and an experimental sociolinguistic study.
Published (early access) in Semantics and Pragmatics, 2026.
A treatment of additivity that uses Inquisitive Semantics and Bayesian pragmatics to account for a previously undocumented use of English too that I call the ‘argument-building’ use.
Recommended citation: Thomas, William C. 2026. A probabilistic, question-based approach to additivity. Semantics and Pragmatics 19(1). https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.19.1.
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(Second author with Ashwini Deo.) Published in Journal of Semantics, 2025.
A unified analysis of English just.
Recommended citation: Deo, Ashwini and William C. Thomas. 2025. Addressing the widest answerable question: English just as a domain-widening strategy. Journal of Semantics 42(1–2), 1–37.
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(With Ashwini Deo.) Published in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 2024.
An analysis of emphatic and precisifying uses of just that reveals some previously unobserved heterogeneity within the class of Maximum Standard Adjectives.
Recommended citation: Thomas, William C. and Ashwini Deo. 2024. 'Just' as a scale widener with maximum-standard adjectives: emphatic/precisifying effects. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28, 895–911.
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Published in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 2023.
An analysis of the refutational use of English too according to which it is a polarity particle with a special sensitivity to discourse commitments.
Recommended citation: Thomas, William C. 2023. English does too have a [REVERSE,+] polarity particle! Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27, 641–654.
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Published in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT), 2022.
An analysis of the additive and disjunctive uses of either in Inquisitive Semantics.
Recommended citation: Thomas, William C. 2021. Toward a unified semantics for English either. Proceedings of SALT 31, 446–465.
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Published in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2021.
An experiment about how people are judged for using just in a workplace setting.
Recommended citation: Thomas, William C. 2021. Social inferences from the use of just as an exclusive particle. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 6, 746–760.
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Published in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 2020.
An analysis just in combination with equative and comparative constructions.
Recommended citation: Thomas, William C. and Ashwini Deo. 2020. The interaction of just with modified scalar predicates. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24(2), 354–372.
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