Laia Mayol

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on linguistics, pragmatics and semantics and English grammar. Before that, I held postdoctoral research positions at UPF (through the ‘Juan de la Cierva’ program) and the UAB, and I obtained my doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.

I am interested in pragmatics and semantics (both theoretical and experimental). In particular, my research is centered on the following topics: information and discourse structure, non-truth conditional meaning and anaphora production and interpretation. I’m currently working on the project EXPEDIS. I’m a member of the officially-recognized Formal Linguistics Group (GLIF) and of UPF's larger Linguistics Research Unit (UR-LING), and coordinador of the Master in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

I wrote the textbook "Curs de pragmàtica: una introducció a l'estudi del significat en context",  available in open access.

Some recent work:

Liao, Xixian, Thomas Brochhagen, Gemma Boleda & Laia Mayol. 2025. The role of referent predictability in pronoun production: Insights from a Bayesian meta-analysis. Language.

Silvio Cruschina & Laia Mayol. 2025. Gradience and optionality in the syntactic realization of focus. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics.

Silvio Cruschina & Laia Mayol. 2025. The distribution of focus and the mapping between syntax and information structure. Journal of Linguistics.

Elena Castroviejo & Laia Mayol. 2024. An empirical study on the semantics-pragmatics of two Romance confirmational tags. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics.

Liao, Xixian & Boleda, Gemma & Rohde, Hannah & Mayol, Laia. 2024. Comparing models of pronoun production and interpretation via observational and experimental evidence. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.