I am a linguist and a philosopher. My interests lie in the area of semantics (mostly truth-conditional), pragmatics (mostly post-Gricean),  philosophy of language, philosophy of time, and metaphysics of time. I can define myself as a post-Gricean pragmaticist, truth-conditional semanticist of a dynamic semantics orientation, and a supporter of contextualism in the representation of meaning, i. e. the idea that the interesting truth conditions are those of an utterance rather than a sentence: information from pragmatic inference and other contextual input contributes to the truth-conditional content. I am also interested in the representation of time in different languages and  in discourse, and how it relates to the human concept of time and the metaphysics of time.

I am interested in modelling meaning in discourse that takes into account  its dynamic, joint construal in discourse interaction, the speaker' s as well as the addressee's perspective,  aiming at revealing its compositional character on the level of primary, intended and recovered messages.  As part of this research, I have developed the concept of the so-called functional proposition (Jaszczolt 2021; Elder and Jaszczolt 2024). In my theory of Default Semantics (e.g. Jaszczolt 2005, 2010, 2022), I have implemented the dynamic semantic approach modelled on Discourse Representation Theory to a wide category of acts of communication, accounting for the pragmatic origin of some components of truth-conditional meaning as it is understood on contextualist assumptions. I have worked on the semantics of propositional attitude reports and other intensional contexts; referring expressions; semantic ambiguity and underspecification; semantics/pragmatics interface; the saying/implicating distinction, and defaults in communication. My long-term project stemming from this theory concerns mapping of various aspects of meaning of acts of communication onto relevant processes and modelling their interaction.

My other main project concerns the philosophy of  time and the semantics and pragmatics of temporal reference (Jaszczolt 2020, 2023a, 2023b). In particular, I am trying to understand the human concept(s) of time and the flow of time, looking at evidence from temporal expressions in different natural languages on the one hand, and the relation between human (dynamic, passing) time and (static) time as it is understood in modern physics. I build here on the ideas from  my Representing Time (OUP, 2009), where I developed an account of temporality understood as epistemic modality: a degree of commitment to the situation conveyed by the utterance. This allows me to view the human concept of time as reducible to primitive modal concepts and thereby provide an account of the concept (and possibly also experience) of the flow.

My related interests concern compositionality of language vis-à -vis compositionality of thought, conceptualization of time in various languages, and contrastive semantics and pragmatics. 

I have also worked on first-person reference from the philosophical as well as cross-linguistic perspective, addressing such questions as the linguistic means that are used to refer to oneself in different cultures, the status of first-person beliefs (beliefs 'de se'), and the semantic properties of reports on beliefs de se. It is evident from the study of the means that languages employ for first-person reference that there is no bi-unique mapping between expression types and the concept of 'referring to oneself'; there are also degrees to which the concept of first-person reference is salient and conveyed in discourse. This leads to a pragmatic category of indexicals, proposed in my Meaning in Linguistic Interaction: Semantics, Metasemantics, Philosophy of Language (OUP, 2016).

I have supervised many undergraduate, MPhil and PhD dissertations and welcome applications in topic areas related to my interests and beyond, within semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language.

I was recently Principal Investigator in two projects: (i) Rethinking Being Gricean: New Challenges for Metapragmatics funded by the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Cambridge, in which we investigated the challenges to the Gricean program posed by some post-Gricean developments in semantics and and pragmatics and (ii) Expressing the Self: Cultural Diversity and Cognitive Universals funded by The Leverhulme Trust, in which we investigated self-reference across a range of languages from different language families. I am currently participating in a project CHRONOS: Rethinking and Communicating Time with Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. 

Updated 29 June 2024