LINGUAE

LINGUAE is a research group of Institut Jean-Nicod (a CNRS/ENS/EHESS laboratory), which is itself a member of ENS’s Département d’Etudes Cognitives (DEC). LINGUAE is one of the teams of DEC-Linguistics.

The group works on language and its interfaces with cognition, with a special focus on meaning. Research topics include semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, reasoning, sign language linguistics, primate linguistics, and music cognition.

About us

LINGUAE in the media

For information: links to theoretical linguistics events in streaming https://sites.google.com/view/streamgram

News

[June 2025] Jeremy Kuhn has been awarded a CNRS Bronze Medal. The recognition is extraordinarily well deserved; congratulations to him!

[April 2025] We are delighted to announce that Yair Lakretz was ranked second for one of four junior CNRS positions in linguistics, and that Jeremy Kuhn was ranked third for one of five senior CNRS positions in linguistics. Congratulations to both!

[April 2025] Nicolas Guérin defended his dissertation entitled "Sémantique, Traduction et Connaissance dans les Modèles de Langage basés sur les Transformers". The jury, composed of experts in cognitive science, philosophy, and machine learning reported their very high impression of the work and the solid presentation. Nicolas also accepted a job in industry immediately after. Congratulations Nicolas!

[2025] Milica Denić, who obtained her PhD in the group, has accepted a position as a maître d'enseignement et de recherche (senior lecturer) in the Linguistics Department at the University of Geneva. Congratulations Milica, we look forward to following your research onwards and continuing the interactions.

[December 2024] Thomas Souverain defended his dissertation entitled "Comment l'IA nous classe : Expliquer l'IA dans les services financiers et la recherche d'emploi, des solutions techniques aux enjeux éthiques". The dissertation was funded by a CIFRE convention between ENS-PSL (P. Egré supervisor) and two companies (Dreamquark, France Travail) that trained Thomas as a data-scientist and AI engineer. The thesis is a contribution to explainable AI and AI ethics, with a focus on fairness in AI classification. It received high praise from the committee (MA Dilhac, JG Ganascia, A. Ozkes, S. Ruphy). Thomas is now a postdoctoral researcher at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), doing research on large language models. Congratulations Thomas!

[December 2024] Quentin Blomet defended his dissertation entitled "Mixed consequence logics", investigating duality relations and interpolation in the logics ST, TS and their family. The thesis, co-supervised by P. Égré and A. Tamminga, was a co-tutelle between ENS-Paris and Greifswald University in Germany. Quentin defended his work in front of a panel of international experts (E. Chemla, S. Fritella, F. Poggiolesi, E. Ripley, D. Szmuc) and received a magna cum laude, the highest distinction in the German system. Congratulations Quentin!

[December 2024] Jakob Süskind defended his dissertation entitled "A theory of verisimilitude", supervised by P. Égré, and revisiting Popper's concept and solving a number of problems of Popper's account of approximation to the truth, using a framework inspired by a Hamblin-style account of the semantics of questions. The thesis was acclaimed as an important novel contribution in formal epistemology and the philosophy of science by the committee (A. Barberousse, J. Brumberg-Chaumont, G. Cevolani, H. Rott, J. Sprenger). Congratulations Jakob!

[December 2024] Yair Lakretz defended his massively multidisciplinary HDR. The HDR is a diploma recognizing qualification to supervise PhD candidates in France. Long overdue.

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