I'm interested in natural language interpretation, that is, in explaining how we associate meanings not just with words, but most especially with phrases and sentences. Figuring this out involves figuring out the structure of the complex expression one is interpreting, the interpretive conventions we associate with each kind of phrase structure, and the interaction of linguistic context and world knowledge with more conventionalized aspects of interpretation. I was trained within the so-called formal semantic tradition, but over the last fifteen years have increasingly explored vector-based and, more recently, information-theoretic models of meaning.
I'm currently co-Editor-in-Chief with Kjell Johan Sæbø of the Linguistic Society of America's open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P), a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Linguistics, and Advisory Board member for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. I'm also a Mercator Fellow affiliated with Nicole Gotzner's Emmy Noether group "Scales in language processing and acquisition" (SPA). You can download a fairly recent CV here.
If you're interested in opportunities for undergraduate or graduate study, postdoctoral research or a short term research stay in Barcelona, don't hesitate to contact me via e-mail. Our Formal Linguistics Group, GLiF, (for 'Grup de Lingüística Formal' in Catalan) has junior and senior researchers and graduate students in the areas of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and we form a larger Linguistics Research Unit with the Department of Translation and Language Science's ALLENCAM, a group devoted to multilingual language learning and acquisition, the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory group (COLT), the Grammar and Cognition Lab (GraC), and the Prosodic and Gestural Studies Group (GRePG).
Department of Translation and Language Sciences
Roc Boronat building (Poblenou campus)
Roc Boronat, 138
08018 Barcelona
(+34) 93 542 15 54
(+34) 93 542 16 17