Julie Hunter

Fellow April to July 2011
PhD Student at the University of Texas in Austin, USA and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris

Born 1979 in Houston, Texas, USA
Studied Philosophy in Austin


Research Project:
The Discourse Context Dependence of Definites

The interpretations of English indexicals (including ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’, and so on) are, in their paradigmatic uses, sensitive only to the features of an actual utterance or thought event. Indexicals are notoriously resistant to influence from the discourse environment. However, as many have noted, there are uses of indexicals that do not fit comfortably within the standard mold. In the free indirect style used in some narratives, ‘here’ and temporal indexicals are sensitive to the point of view of the protagonist, even though the protagonist is picked out with a third person pronoun (‘He would call today/this morning. She was sure of it’.). We see similar uses even outside of fictional contexts (‘Normally the liquid would not burn, but now it exploded, it was consumed so rapidly’). Still other uses of indexicals, notably ‘now’, ‘here’, and ‘actual’/‘actually’, seem so loose as to not really concern times or places or worlds at all. Instead they serve to structure a discourse (‘Let’s imagine how it will go: John gets out of his car. He’s now walking to the office…).
In my research, I will be studying the behavior of these discourse sensitive uses of indexicals, with a view to determining their relation to paradigmatic uses of indexicals and to explaining why they are sensitive to their discourse environment when the paradigmatic uses are so remarkably resistant to it.


Selected Publications:

Hunter, J. 2010. “Descriptive Indexicals” in S. Pogodalla and P. Amsili (eds.): Proceedings of Journées Sémantique et Modélisation. March 25-26, 2010 in Nancy. Nancy: pp.40-42.

Hunter, J., Baldridge, J. and N. Asher. 2007. Annotation for and Robust Parsing of Discourse Structure on Unrestricted Texts. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 26: 213-239.

Hunter, J. and N. Asher. 2005. “A Presuppositional Account of Indexicals” in P. Dekker and M. Franke (eds.): Proceedings of the Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium. December 19-21, 2005 in Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Grafisch Centrum Amsterdam, pp. 119-124.