I am currently doing my PhD in philosophy of language at the Ruhr University

Bochum. I am a trained linguist, have worked on conjunction and plurality,

and am specializing in modal semantics now.

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My PhD thesis is going to be the first broad semantic investigation of memory

reports. Together with my first supervisor and PI Kristina Liefke, I put forth a

unified compositional semantics for memory predicates attributing propositional knowledge -- also in the case of 'remembering how' (as opposed to 'remembering that').

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To provide the empirical basis for this, I am designing a series of online behavioral studies that test for interactions between the grammatical structure (e.g. 'remember swimming' vs. 'remember that x swam') and the kind of experience or evidence the agent has wrt. the remembered fact or event.

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My project is a part (P10) of the inter-disciplinary FOR2812:Constructing scenarios of the past. All of my formal semantic work is (to be) linked to concepts discussed in the cognitive sciences and in the philosophy of memory, especially to constructive 'episodic memory' in (seeming?) opposition to fact storage on the one hand and constructive imagination on the other hand.

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Some issues that keep me up at night (mostly figuratively speaking) at the moment wrt. my main project are the following. Get in touch for discussions, and feel free to send me your own relevant work!

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• The relation between evidence and kinds of experience and their internal/external interpretations

• I predict that our believes about other people's cognition and reliability influence the acceptability of memory reports. Actual world cognition leading to pragmatic inferences? Cancellability via counterfactual cognition?

• Morpho-syntactic typology of memory predicates (esp. in relation to knowledge, imagination, perception, and reflexive morphology)

• Pragmatics of knowledge and memory reports: When is it motivated to stress our evidence or experiential relation to the past in opposition to simple assertion of the content?

• My forced choice (Speaker-ID) experimental results appear to be in tension with my 'truth value judgement' scale results. Do the formats give rise to / suppress different pragmatic effects?

• Our semantics provides a natural link for discontinuity between episodic remembering and imagining (via evidence) at the level of the predicate, but continuity at the level of the complement (e.g. 'remember/imagine swimming'). This is new evidence in the philosophical dis-/continuism debate.

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I value political applications of my work and think a lot about grounding assumptions, methodology and epistemology. Some examples:

 

• Context (in-)dependency and vagueness of gender terms

• New approaches to the interfaces between compositional semantics, aspects of 'pragmatics', socio-linguistics, and the lexicon

• The validity of arguments linking non-language cognition, linguistics, and philosophical ontology.

• Linguistic aspects of neurodiversity, esp. autistic vs. allistic communication

• Is it possible to test for effects of study formats on results beyond 'relative to each other'?

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