I am a theoretical linguist with strong interests in philosophy. I work on meaning. My research lies mainly at the intersection of formal semantics, formal pragmatics and philosophy of language, with forays into syntax, prosody, and epistemology, and always has a firm cross-linguistic component.

I am currently an Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent; tenured) at Utrecht University, where I am a researcher at the Language, Logic and Information group at the Institute for Language Sciences and teach in the Liberal Arts and Sciences program at the University College Utrecht. Before coming to the Netherlands, I worked in Germany, at the Linguistics Department in Konstanz and at the Collaborative Research Center "Construction of Meaning" in Tübingen. And before that, I got my PhD in Lingustics at UCLA.

My research program centers on knowledge and belief: (i) the many means languages have to express epistemic and doxastic notions, (ii) the formal tools we need to descibe them, (iii) how they relate to the architercture of discourse, and (vi) how they inform our understanding of the natural language ontology. The specific phenomena I have worked on include evidentiality, modality, subjective language, attitude ascriptions, clausal complementation, speech acts, and question bias. Read more here.

I am also a photographer and an outdoor addict.

Contact me:

recent and upcoming

February 2025. TBA. Invited talk at the 25th Szklarska Poręba Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics, Szklarska Poręba, Poland.

January 2025. "Question bias, private beliefs and common knowledge". Invited talk at the workshop "Background beliefs in the construction of meaning", University of Tübingen, Germany.

December 2024. "Facts, intentions, questions: English 'come-to-know' predicates in deliberative environments". Talk at the 24th Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (w/ Pranav Anand)

June 2024. New manuscript: "A new perspective on negative bias in polar questions: The view from Russian". Submitted to: Eckardt, R., G. Walkden and N. Dehé. The Oxford Handbook of Non-Canonical Questions. [paper]

June 2024. "Today I learned: English 'coming-to-know' predicates". Talk at the workshop "Advances in the semantics of clause-embedding predicates: Theories, cross-linguistic data, and experimentation", University of Konstanz, Germany. (w/ Pranav Anand)

May 2024. "A new outlook on cognitive factives". Colloquium of the Institute for Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, Germany. (based on joint work w/ Pranav Anand)

April 2024. "To li or not to li". Talk at the workshop "Workshop on Polar Question Meaning[s] Across Languages", ILLC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (w/ Masha Esipova) [slides]

February 2024. "Today I learned: English 'coming-to-know' predicates". Talk at the workshop "(De-)composition and modification of attitude predicates" at the 46th Annual meeting of the German Lingiustic Society (DGfS), University of Bochum, Germany. (w/ Pranav Anand)

January 2024. "To li or not to li: A close look on polar questions in Russian". Inivited talk at S-Circle, UC Santa Cruz, USA. (based on joint work w/ Masha Esipova)

January 2024. "A new outlook on cognitive factives". Invited talk at the Construction of Meaning Workshop, Stanford, USA. (w/ Pranav Anand)

November 2023. "To li or not to li". Talk at the Formal Descriptions of Slavic Languages 16, University of Graz, Austria. (w/ Masha Esipova) [slides]

October 2023. "Conversational dynamics of razve-questions in Russian". Invited talk at the Discourse and Philosophy Colloquium, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

September 2023. "Expressing evidence". Journal of Pragmatics 218, 1-5. Editorial for the special issue Expressing evidence. (w/ Corien Bary) [paper]

February 2023. "Conversational dynamics of razve-questions in Russian", paper in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27. [paper]

February 2023. "Vanilla rules: The 'no ice cream' construction in English", paper in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27. (w/ Felix Frühauf, Hadil Karawani, Todor Koev, Doris Penka and Daniel Skibra) [paper]