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: Logic in Semantic Universals (2022-2025)

Members

• Wataru Uegaki, Principal Investigator
• Ciyang Qing, Postdoctoral Fellow
• Ella Hannon, Research Assistant
• Esther Lam, PhD student
• Takanobu Nakamura, PhD student

Collaborators

• Jennifer Culbertson (Edinburgh)
• Mora Maldonado (Nantes)
• Deniz Özyıldız (Konstanz)
• Floris Roelofsen (Amsterdam)
• Maribel Romero (Konstanz)
• Jakub Szymanik (Amsterdam)
• Malte Zimmermann (Potsdam)

Alumni

• Victoria-Elliot Bush, Research Assistant (RA 2022; currently a student at QMUL)
• Bao Di (MSc 2021)
• Jenny Wu (MSc 2020; currently a 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.