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I am a Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics department at Queen Mary University of London. My research focuses on formal semantics and its interfaces, and draws on both English and cross-linguistic data. Before coming to London, I obtained my PhD at Harvard, and then moved to Berlin to take up a research position at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS).

Much of my research has focused on attitude reports, perspective, and the de se. My PhD thesis, titled The Sense of Self: Topics in the Semantics of De Se Expressions, is available at the semantics archive. I have also worked on topics related to plurality, the cross-linguistic semantics of comparatives, presupposition and implicature. More about these projects can be found under the Publications tab, and I welcome comments at h.pearson@qmul.ac.uk.

I'm an Associate Editor of Semantics and Pragmatics, and formerly a Co-Editor of Linguistic Inquiry Squibs and Discussion. I am also currently Convenor of the MA in Linguistics at Queen Mary. Please drop me an email to find out more about our programme!

Recent manuscripts

  • 'On testing for de se and de re construals across languages'. Accepted pending revisions at Semantic Fieldwork Methods.

  • 'Impersonal pronouns and first-person perspective'. Under review at Annual Review of Linguistics.

Recent publications

  • 'Excluded entailments and the de se/de re partition' appeared in Inquiry (open access). [with Tom Roeper]

  • 'Individual and stage-level predicates of personal taste: another argument for genericity as the source of faultless disagreement' appeared in Perspectives on Taste

  • Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25 has been published by University of Konstanz [edited by Patrick Grosz, Luisa Marti, Hazel Pearson, Yasutada Sudo, Sarah Zobel]

Recent and upcoming talks, conferences, workshops and summer schools.

  • Impersonal pronouns and the acquaintance inference. Invited talk, Workshop on Perspectival Plurality, Warsaw, May 2022.

  • Workshop on the Acquaintance Inference, University of Konstanz, October 2022. [Invited talk, title TBA]

  • Sinn und Bedeutung 28, Ruhr-University Bochum, September 2023. [Invited talk, title TBA]

[Photo credit: Natasha Korotkova]