Hello! My name is Jeremy Zehr and I am a linguist and a programmer. As of January 2024, I work as a software engineer for the Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI) at the University of Zurich. Until December 2022, I was an application developer at the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, I was a post-doctoral researcher in semantics and pragmatics in Florian Schwarz's lab and for the mindCORE project. I completed my Ph.D. thesis in Linguistics, titled "Vagueness, Presupposition and Truth-Value Judgments", at the Institut Jean Nicod, under the co-supervision of Paul Egré and Orin Percus.
I am the developer of PCIbex, an open-science solution for desgining and running online experiments. You can learn how to use it here and try it for yourself here (no account required). The project is currently generously funded by mindCORE.
PCIbex stands for PennController for IBEX. IBEX is an open-source experimental software designed by Alex Drummond, and "controllers" are its modules. PCIbex started off as a simple extension for IBEX before it became an entity of its own. Now, the term PCIbex covers multiple aspects of the solution: its specific mini-language, the javascript engine that runs experiments, and the online platform where users can create and host their experiments.
In addition to my work on PCIbex, I have worked on and/or developed several data-collection-related tools and pipelines while working at LiRI and LDC. Here I briefly describe my role in two of the projects that I worked on:
I am interested in formal semantics and pragmatics, with a particular focus on scales, presuppositions and implicatures.
My most recent project, in collaboration with Nattanun Chanchaochai, documents and investigates the use of the Thai particle kʰɯ̂n as an operator that can alternatively preserve and reverse the orientation of scalar predicates. While operators found in English are exclusively preserving (eg. "warm up") or reversing (eg. "less warm"), Thai ʔùn kʰɯ̂n (="warm KHUEN") can describe both temperature increases (much like "warm up") and decreases from higher temperatures (≈"closer to being warm"). This, to our knowledge, is the first documented instance of a grammaticalized degree operator that demonstrates ambidirectionality. See the SALT abstract
Please feel free to email me about my research and if you need any abstract, slides or manuscript.