Edinburgh Meaning Science Lab combines theories and methodologies from cross-linguistic formal semantics and evolutionary linguistics to investigate questions such as: ‘How are meanings expressed in natural language?’, ‘Are there universal patterns in the way meanings are encoded in different languages?’, ‘If there are such universal patterns, what are the principles that underlie them?’.
Currently, the lab is running the following two research projects:
- AHRC/DFG project: MECORE: A cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions in clausal embedding (2021-2024)
- UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship: LiSU: Logic in Semantic Universals (2022-2025)
Members
- Wataru Uegaki, Principal Investigator
- Anne Mucha, Postdoctoral Fellow (LiSU)
- Ciyang Qing, Postdoctoral Fellow (MECORE)
- James Engels, Research Assistant (LiSU)
- Fred Whibley, Research Assistant (LiSU)
- Esther Lam, PhD student
- Tim Jantarungsee, MScR student
Collaborators
- Jennifer Culbertson (Edinburgh)
- Mora Maldonado (Nantes)
- Deniz Özyıldız (Konstanz)
- Floris Roelofsen (Amsterdam)
- Maribel Romero (Konstanz)
- Jakub Szymanik (Amsterdam)
- Malte Zimmermann (Potsdam)
Alumni
- Takanobu Nakamura (PhD 2022; Currently Postdoc at ILLC Amsterdam)
- Mingyang Bian (MSc 2022)
- Neng Wan (MSc 2022)
- Ella Hannon (LiSU RA 2022; currently PhD student at UBC Linguistics)
- Victoria-Elliot Bush (LiSU Intern 2022; currently a student at QMUL)
- Bao Di (MSc 2021)
- Jenny Wu (MSc 2020; currently PhD student at UCLA Philosophy)
- Yunchong Huang (MSc 2020)
Talk series
Jointly with Brian Rabern (Edinburgh Philosophy), we organise a talk series by external and internal speakers who work on issues in meaning. See here for the current schedule of the talk series.