Meaning and grammar

The meaning and grammar group conducts research in a wide range of core areas of linguistic theory, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology and the interface between those areas. Members of the group work as individuals, in collaboration with each other, and in partnership with other researchers in Edinburgh and at other universities.

The research group provides a regular forum for presentation of original research in this area being carried out by group members, and scholars from outside Edinburgh. It also constitutes a grouping for planning and organising collaborative research.

People

Staff who work in this area include:

Image	Research interests
Peter Ackema	Theoretical syntax and morphology; interaction between morphology and syntax; lexical integrity effects; phrasal derivation
Ronnie Cann	Formal syntax, semantics and pragmatics and the interaction between them; dynamic Syntax
Chris Cummins	Experimental semantics and pragmatics; quantity expressions; implicature; presupposition; dialogue modelling
Kajsa Djärv	Semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces with syntax; argument-structure, clausal complementation and attitude reports, speech acts, presupposition.
Nikolas Gisborne	Syntax, particularly dependency theory and word grammar; events and event structure; lexical semantics; language change
Caroline Heycock	Syntactic theory; syntactic variation and change; Germanic; Japanese
Itamar Kastner	Morphology; syntax; argument structure; lexical semantics; morphophonology; interfaces between grammatical modules; computational modelling; lexical processing
Alex Lascarides (Informatics)	Theoretical and computational linguistics; semantics; pragmatics; logic and knowledge representation
Catherine Lai	Speech prosody, spoken language understanding, affective computing, semantics, pragmatics, information structure
Hannah Rohde	Experimental pragmatics; coreference; coherence
Wolfgang Schwarz	Structure and interpretation of probability in science, the status of laws, and selected topics in philosophy of physics and cognitive science
Antonella Sorace	Language development in child and adult bilinguals; bilingualism and general cognition; gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface
Mark Steedman (Informatics)	Computational linguistics; spoken intonation; spoken language processing
Rob Truswell	Syntax; semantics; language change; diachronic typology; locality; event structure
Wataru Uegaki	Semantics, Syntax, Pragmatics and their interfaces. Especially, clausal complementation, questions, the semantics of attitudinal predicates and constraints on lexical denotations

Postgraduate study

• PhD and MSc by Research programmes

For further information about postgraduate study in meaning and grammar, contact Professor Nikolas Gisborne.

Nikolas Gisborne

Meetings

The meaning and grammar group meets roughly every two weeks, to discuss theoretical issues of common interest, work in progress or published papers. There are also occasional informal presentations by invited speakers from outside Edinburgh.

To subscribe to the group's mailing list and hear about future events, go to the mailing lists service and click on 'subscribe'.

Mailing lists service 

Meaning and grammar meetings

In addition to meetings of the full group, there are more specialised reading groups that meet informally on an occasional basis. The current groups focus on formal semantics (contact Wataru Uegaki for details), and on general syntax (contact Takanobu Nakamura for details). EdinMorph is an interdisciplinary reading and discussion group for morphology and its interfaces (contact Itamar Kastner to be added to the dedicated MS Team). For postgraduate students who are interested in semantics/pragmatics, get in touch with the student-led SemiCircle (Anna Katarina Page).