Lecturers

Valentina Bambini

Valentina Bambini is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS Pavia, Italy). She was educated at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy), where she also received her PhD in Linguistics with a dissertation on the brain basis of metaphor comprehension. Her main research interests focus on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of pragmatic and communicative abilities, both in healthy and pathological conditions. She works on developing new assessment tools and training programs to promote pragmatic abilities in patients and across the lifespan. At our summer school Valentina will teach the course on "Pragmatic language disorder"

Sigrid Beck

Sigrid Beck got her PhD at the University of Tübingen in 1996 and her Habilitation at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main in 2003. Further stages of her career have been the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Connecticut, the University Potsdam, MIT and the University of Tübingen. Her area of specialization is semantics (with work in particular on questions, focus, plurals, comparison constructions and decomposition adverbs). She is interested in bringing to bear different data sources on semantic theory, e.g. crosslinguistic comparison, diachronic data and acquisition data. At our summer school Sigrid will give one of the evening lectures.

Judith Degen

Judith Degen holds a PhD in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics from the University of Rochester. She is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Her interests lie at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. In her research, she employs methods from computational and experimental psycholinguistics to address the question of how speakers and listeners communicate in an uncertain world. In the past she has worked on the production and comprehension of quantifiers, scalar implicatures, and referential expressions. Judith will teach the course on "Probabilistic pragmatics".

Cornelia Ebert

Cornelia Ebert is interested in the multimodal aspects of language and her work is focused on speech-accompanying gestures and how their meaning contribution interacts with the semantic content of the speech signal. She received her PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2007. As a postdoc, she worked at the Universities of Osnabrück and Stuttgart. She is currently one of the Principal Investigators of the XPrag.de project "PSIMS: The Pragmatic Status of Iconic Meaning in Spoken Communication: Gestures, Ideophones, Prosodic Modulations". Since April 2019, she is a professor of Semantics at Goethe University Frankfurt. Cornelia will teach the course on "Gestures".

Nicole Gotzner

Nicole Gotzner is a researcher at the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin. She has obtained a PhD from Humboldt University, where she is currently a visiting professor. Her research focus is in experimental semantics and pragmatics. She is working on a broad range of topics such as focus prosody, particles, implicatures, free choice and the interpretation of gradable adjectives. Nicole will teach the course on "Statistics with R".

Maria Teresa Guasti

Maria Teresa Guasti is professor of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics at the Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca. She deals with the acquisition of language in children in different contexts and circumstances: bilingual acquisition, language acquisition in children with cochlear implantation, in children with specific language disorders, in children with dyslexia, in children with autism. Her interests focus on the phonology-syntax interface, on the acquisition of morphosyntax, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. She also deals with the relationship between language and music and between language and writing. At the summer school, she will teach the course on "Semantics and Pragmatics in Language Acquisition" together with Napoleon Katsos.

Napoleon Katsos

I am interested in how psychological research can inform theoretical linguistic inquiry and vice versa. My particular focus is in the area of semantics and pragmatics, and in language learning by monolingual and bilingual children as well as children with Specific Language Impairment and/or Autistic Disorders. Napoleon will teach the course on "Semantics and Pragmatics in Language Acquisition" together with Maria Teresa Guasti.

Barbara Kaup

Barbara Kaup’s research addresses the processes and representations involved in language comprehension, in particular with regard to semantic and pragmatic aspects of sentence interpretation. Barbara Kaup obtained her PhD in Psychology from the Technical University of Berlin with a thesis that was prepared at the Graduate School of Cognitive Science at Hamburg University. Afterwards she spent three years as a postdoc in the lab of Don Foss at Florida State University, and then returned to Berlin to head an Emmy-Noether Group concerned with the processing and representation of negation during language comprehension. She is currently Professor for Cognitive Psychology at the University of Tübingen. Barbara will give one of the evening lectures.

Manfred Krifka

Manfred Krifka is professor of General Linguistics at Humboldt Universität Berlin and director of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin. His main research area is the semantics of natural languages, including nominal reference, aspectual classes, focus and information structure, questions and speech acts. In pragmatics, he has worked on precise and approximate interpretation of number words and on appropriate answers to questions. He has also done extensive field work on Austronesian languages in Vanuatu. Manfred will teach the course on "Speech Acts".

Johann-Mattis List

I am a senior scientist at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and pursue an interdisciplinary research project on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison (CALC), funded by the European Research Council from April 2017 until March 2022. In this project, we will try to develop methods and interfaces that bridge the gap between computational and classical approaches to historical linguistics in order to shed light on the history of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In my research, I generally follow a data-driven, empirical, and quantitative perspective on language change and language history. In contrast to pure computational approaches, however, I try to keep my research closely connected to traditional historical linguistics and theory, following a computer-assisted rather than a computer-based framework of quantitative research in historical linguistics. Johann-Mattis will teach the course on "Pragmatics of Language Evolution".

Diana Mazzarella

Diana Mazzarella is Assistant Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). After completing her Ph.D. in Linguistics at University College London in 2015, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut des Sciences Cognitive Marc Jeannerod (Lyon, France) and the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics ZAS (Berlin, Germany). Her main research interests are in pragmatics and its interfaces with epistemic vigilance and Theory of Mind. Diana will teach the course “Viewing experimental pragmatics from a cognitive science perspective” together with Ira Noveck.

Ira Noveck

Ira Noveck is a Research Director at the CNRS Institut des Sciences Cognitives - Marc Jeannerod in Lyon, France. He is one of the founding fathers of experimental pragmatics. The 2004 volume he edited with Dan Sperber collected research in experimental pragmatics up to 2004 and laid the basis for future research in this area. He recently published a new book “Experimental Pragmatics: The Making of A Cognitive Science”. Ira is one of the Mercator Fellows of the DFG priority program "XPrag.de: New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental Evidence (SPP 1727)". He will teach the course on "Viewing Experimental Pragmatics from a Cognitive Science perspective".

Hazel Pearson

Hazel Pearson is a Lecturer in Formal Semantics in the Linguistics department at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on formal semantics and its interfaces, and draws on both English and cross-linguistic data. She also works in experimental semantics and pragmatics. Before coming to London, she obtained her PhD at Harvard, and then moved to Berlin to take up a research position at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS). Hazel will teach the course on "Perspective".

Salvatore Pistoia-Reda

Salvatore Pistoia-Reda is a philosophy of language researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) Berlin and a philosophy professor at Università degli Studi di Siena. He holds or has held fellowships with several international institutions, including the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and the William J. Fulbright Foundation. Salvatore Pistoia-Reda’s current research interests include the pragmatics and semantics of natural languages, with a specific focus on the interaction between linguistic interpretation and world knowledge.

Maribel Romero

Maribel Romero's research investigates phenomena in semantics and at the syntax-semantics and semantics-pragmatics interface. She has conducted extensive research on questions, focus, negation, intensionality, copular sentences, epistemic bias and superlatives. She is also interested in comparing different grammar formalisms (e.g. Generative Grammar vs. Tree-Adjoining Grammar) in their derivation of semantic effects. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1998 and held Assistant and Associate Professor positions at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998-2007. She is currently professor of semantics at the University of Konstanz. Maribel will teach the course on "Questions"

Uli Sauerland

The central topic of Uli Sauerland's research is how humans assign meaning to sentences. He approaches this question using judgment data, formal experiments, child language studies, and linguistic field-work. He integrates these data to develop mathematically explicit models of semantics and pragmatics. After completing his Ph.D. at MIT in 1998, Uli has taught on these topics as a professor at several universities including Stanford University, the University of Vienna, and Harvard University. He is vice director of the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin and, the spokesperson of XPrag.de. Uli will teache the course on "The semantics-pragmatics interface".

Philippe Schlenker

P. Schlenker is a senior researcher at CNRS (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from EHESS (Paris). He has taught at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, at the University of Southern California, at UCLA, and, since 2008, at NYU. P. Schlenker’s early interests included semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has conducted research on indexicals and indirect discourse, intensional semantics, anaphora, presuppositions, as well as semantic paradoxes. Philippe will teach the course on "Presuppositions".

Petra Schumacher

Petra Schumacher is professor of German Linguistics/Empirical Linguistics at the University of Cologne. After obtaining her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale University, she carried out research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig), the University of Marburg, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) and the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. In her research, she employs methods from psycho- and neurolinguistics. Her research focuses on processes at the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, including reference, information structure, perspective taking and metonymy. Petra will teach the course on "Reference".

Jesse Snedeker

Jesse Snedeker is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research uses simple behavioral methods to study language comprehension and production in young children, people with developmental disorders, and typical adults. The guiding assumption is that linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, language development, and disordered language are different windows onto a single system, and thus data from one area is likely to constrain theories in the others. Much of her work explores how language encodes meaning (semantics and pragmatics) and uses temporally sensitive measures (like eyetracking). Her favorite phenomena include: scalar implicature, presupposition, scope ambiguity, the development of verb argument structure, priming paradigms, syntactic ambiguity resolution, language creation (in the wild and in the lab), pitch accents and discourse structure, pronoun resolution, and negation. Jesse will teach the course on "Eye-Tracking".

Maria Spychalska

Maria Spychalska is a psycholinguist and a philosopher. She works in the field of neuropragmatics and investigates pragmatic aspects of language processing by means of electroencephalography (EEG). She completed her PhD in philosophy at the Ruhr University of Bochum with the dissertation “Quantifying in the Brain. Combining philosophical and neurocognitive perspectives on quantification and scalar implicatures in natural language”. Currently, she is affiliated at the department of German Linguistics, University of Cologne, and leads an XPRAG.de project “Reconsidering the epistemic step: The role of speaker’s and listener’s perspectives for the processing of quantity and temporal implicatures”. In her research agenda she combines methods from neurolinguistics, in particular EEG, with theoretical questions in the interface between linguistics and philosophy. Maria will teach the course on "Event-related brain potentials as a tool in experimental pragmatics".

Bob van Tiel

Bob van Tiel holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Nijmegen. He has been a postdoctoral researcher in Bielefeld, Nijmegen, and Brussels and now works in the XPRAG.de project "Modelling the Use of Quantifiers in Typical and Atypical Speakers Probabilistically". His research interests focus on semantics and pragmatics, from a theoretical, computational, and experimental perspective. In particular, he focuses on pragmatic inferencing in neurotypical and clinical populations. Bob will teach the course on "Implicatures".

Judith Tonhauser

Judith Tonhauser is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at The Ohio State University and temporary chair of the English Linguistics department at the University of Stuttgart. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. In her research on cross-linguistic semantics and pragmatics, she collects data from theoretically untrained native speakers, both in university labs and in countries like Mexico, Paraguay or India. Recent research topics include information structure, prosody and presuppositions. At our summer school Judith will teach the course on "Fieldwork".

Malte Zimmermann

Malte Zimmermann's research focuses on the investigation of phenomena at the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and their relevance for theory of grammar. In recent years, his empirical focus has been on Non-Indoeuropean languages, and in particular on West African languages, while he also continues to look into the semantics and pragmatics of German. He has conducted extensive research on quantification, discourse particles, focus particles and information structure. He obtained his PhD from the Universiteit van Amsterdam in 2002 and held positions at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He is currently professor of semantics and theory of grammar at the University of Potsdam and director of the DFG-financed collaborative research council SFB 632 "Information Structure". Malte will give one of the evening lectures.