Project Team

Adina Camelia Bleotu (Principal Investigator)

Adina Camelia Bleotu currently teaches at the English Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. She earned her PhD in 2015 from Ca'Foscari University, Venice, with a thesis on denominal verbs.  She then shifted to experimental linguistics, conducting  psycholinguistic experiments on agreement attraction in adults (during a Fulbright Grant at UMass, Amherst), as well as language acquisition studies on a wide number of topics, such as simple and embedded implicatures, the interaction between modality and negation, recursion, a.o. She has recently been a fellow and a postdoc on experimental pragmatics at ZAS, Berlin. You can check her CV here. 

Mara Panaitescu (Postdoctoral Researcher)

Mara Panaitescu currently teaches linguistics at the University of Bucharest. She is one of the few formal semanticists in Romania, having worked extensively on the semantics of free choice in the nominal domain (Panaitescu 2017, 2019), analyzing free choice determiners in a framework of possible worlds semantics within an alternative-based model, on a par with analyses of free choice disjunction. You can check her CV here. 

Gabriela Bȋlbȋie  (Postdoctoral Researcher)

Gabriela Bȋlbȋe currently teaches linguistics at the French Department of the University of Bucharest. She has conducted extensive theoretical and experimental work on ellipsis (Bîlbîie 2017; Bîlbîie & de la Fuente 2019; Bîlbîie et al. 2022) and coordination (Bîlbîie 2008, 2009; Bîlbîie & Croitor 2008; Bîlbîie & Winterstein 2011; Bîlbîie & Gazdik 2012), both during her PhD at Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7) (Supervisor: Anne Abeillé) and afterwards. You can check her CV here. 

Rodica Ivan  (Postdoctoral Researcher)

Rodica Ivan is a Research Scientist at Acuity Insights, who empower higher education institutions to take into account non-academic competencies such as empathy when making key academic decisions. Rodica obtained her PhD in Linguistics from UMass Amherst in 2020. In her dissertation, she presents data from NSF DDRI funded experiments showing that syntactic and pragmatic constraints jointly determine the choice of pronominal expressions for reflexives and bound variable anaphora in Romanian. Other topics Rodica has worked on include binding and coreference more broadly in Romanian and Vietnamese, fake indexicals in Romanian and Farsi, definiteness in Somali, wh-phenomena in Yalalag Zapotec, and NPI illusions in Romanian. You can check her CV here. 

Monica  Rizea - Casa  (Postdoctoral Researcher)

Monica Rizea-Casa is a linguist who specializes in semantics and corpus and computational linguistics.  Monica has obtained her PhD in semantics from the Faculty of Letters, at the University of Bucharest with a thesis on monosemy and polysemy in current scientific terminology . She has been a visiting researcher at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt multiple times, where she collaborated with Manfred Sailer on a project involving minimizers from a theoretical, corpus, and experimental perspective. She  has worked extensively on topics such as negation and negative polarity items.  You can check her CV here.

Andreea Nicolae (Collaborator)

Andreea Nicolae is a senior researcher in semantics and pragmatics at ZAS Berlin, where she is Principal Investigator of the DFG project CrossConn - Logic across languages: expressing and interpreting connectives cross-linguistically. Andreea has a PhD from Harvard University, where she worked on polarity in question under the supervision of Gennaro Chierchia. Her research interests are theoretical semantics and pragmatics, as well as the syntax-semantics interface. She is particularly interested in polarity phenomena, the grammatical encoding of implicature calculation and the syntax and semantics of questions. Andreea has also worked extensively on disjunction and free choice. You can check out her CV here. 

Anton Benz (Collaborator)

Dr. Anton Benz is a senior researcher in the Research Area 4 'Semantics & Pragmatics' at ZAS in Berlin. He is also principal investigator of a DFG project on QUD Gen - Propositional and Non-at-issue Content in Text Generation: Exploring the QUD–Perspective and a DFG Project SIGames 2 - Experimental Game Theory and Scalar Implicatures. Anton Benz is mainly interested in game theory in pragmatics. He works on conversational implicature and applications in productivity in question-answer systems. He combines theoretical modelling with experimental and computational methods. 


Lyn Tieu (Collaborator)

Lyn Tieu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, as well as an Adjunct Fellow with the  MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Development at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Lyn conducts research in the areas of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with a particular focus on linguistic meaning.  She has a PhD from the University of Connecticut with a thesis on children's acquisition of semantics. She uses psycholinguistic and experimental methods to investigate the nature of linguistic meaning and how it is acquired by young children, as well as the interaction of grammar with other modalities including gesture and music. Her research has appeared in journals such as PNAS, Cognition, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, and the Journal of Child Language. Lyn is currently co-editor-in-chief at Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. You can check out her CV here.