The factors determining the nature and the strength of the inferences triggered in discourse are many and intricate; the main goal of my research is to track them and model their interaction in context. My areas of expertise are (sub)lexical semantics, the interfaces between syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics. Focusing on adult as well as child languages, my primary topics of investigation are the semantics of tense, aspect and modality across languages, the event and argument structures of verbal, nominal and adjectival predicates and the semantics/pragmatics of determiners. I make use of a variety of theoretical frameworks and modern techniques of experimental and computational linguistics to collect and analyse data, in regular collaboration with computational linguists, psycholinguists and acquisitionists.

Research areas: semantics, pragmatics, syntax/semantics and morphology/semantics interface in Romance languages (French, Spanish)

Topics:

cross-linguistic semantics

tense, aspect and modality

tense/aspect in (L1, 2L1, heritage) child languages

agentivity, intentionality, causation

partitive uses of telic predicates

(anti-)causative predicates

psychological predicates

evaluative/dispositional predicates

non-literal vs. literal uses of verbal predicates

inner aspect of verbal, adjectival and nominal predicates

interactions between outer and inner aspect