We’re extremely proud to share the news that on January 31st, 2020, Petr Kusliy successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “The Emptiness of the Present: Fronting Constructions as a Window to the Semantics of Tense.” Petr’s dissertation is the first to offer an in-depth study of the semantics of tense within fronted constituents, the features of which are argued to show that (among many other things) (i) English present tense can receive a ‘vacuous’ interpretation, and (ii) subordinate CPs when combining with attitude verbs have a semantics similar to that of weak indefinites.

The attached photo shows Petr triumphantly raising the departmental fish, alongside committee members Rajesh Bhatt, Barbara Partee, Kyle Johnson, Seth Cable (chair), and Alejandro Pérez Carballo.