MCGARRY DEFENDS MA THESIS

It’s the season of strawberries, cherries and defenses: Lauren McGarry defended her MA thesis on May 8th, entitled ‘Pragmatic conditions on non-polar responses’. The thesis is an in-depth investigation of the ways in which indeed and correct, used as responses, differ from polar particles (yes, no) and from one another. One of the results of Lauren’s work is showing that notion of relative epistemic authority (discussed in the formal pragmatics literature in Northrup 2014) is relevant to characterizing these responses. The committee (made up of Adrian Brasoveanu, Donka Farkas (chair), and Jim McCloskey) declared itself very satisfied indeed.