Welcome!

Hello! I’m Bruce Oliver. I’m a linguist, and I enjoy playing video games and hanging out with my dog, Rowan.

I’m a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. My research focuses on language revitalization and semantics.

On the language revitalization end, I have been working with speakers of Secwepemctsín (also known as Shuswap) for the past five years. Secwepemctsín is a Northern Interior Salish language spoken in a large region of the BC Interior, from Kamloops to Williams Lake to Salmon Arm and beyond. I’m very grateful for my teachers and thankful for their patience as I continue asking them to translate crazy sentences!

On the semantics end, I primarily focus on modality and attitude ascriptions. Modality involves expressions of possibility and necessity: any time you talk about what could be true, or what someone must or should do, you’re using modal expressions! Attitude ascriptions describe someone’s thoughts, beliefs, or statements. Many semanticists define these types of statements using possible worlds (and I agree with this assessment). When I say ‘John could be home’, I’m imagining a possible world (although I’m not sure whether it’s the real world) where John is home. Similarly, when I say ‘you have to be quiet’, I’m imagining possible worlds in which my desire