Josh Phillips received his PhD in linguistics from Yale University after completing undergraduate studies in international relations and modern languages at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). From 2021 to 2023, he continued work at the Yale linguistics department as a lecturer and as a postdoctoral scholar in association with the NSF grant "The semantics of negation across time and space," which has funded continuing field research in remote communities in northern Australia. Phillips works on the expression of linguistic meaning and how this changes over time.
SHC Project
At the Intersection of Temporal + Modal interpretation (Essays on Irreality)
Josh Phillips' recent work focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of time & possibility expressions—intensional categories like tense, modality, aspect & negation—and how the linguistic encoding of these concepts varies between language communities and changes over time. Of particular concern is the discovery of linguistic variation and putative universals in the organization of the “irreality” domain —the inventory that human languages make use of to describe hypothetical and counterfactual situations.
A current book project seeks to provide a detailed account of the structure and development of the verbal paradigm in Yolŋu Matha—a language family spoken in the Arnhem Land region of Northern Australia—which exhibits striking (and typologically unusual) variation in the encoding of temporal and modal categories.