I am a postdoc in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Geneva, working with Isabelle Charnavel on her project on bound indexicals, alongside Tom Meadows. Before, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (LLF) in Paris, working with Ira Noveck on the acquisition of modals in French, a project funded by the Fyssen Fondation. I completed my PhD in linguistics at the University of Maryland (USA) in July 2021, where I was advised by Valentine Hacquard and Alexander Williams. Before, I studied at the CogMaster in Paris, where I worked with Benjamin Spector and Emmanuel Chemla, and I was a Course Lecturer for one year at McGill University in Montréal, during one year.
In my work, I combine perspectives from a wide range of disciplines: experimental and theoretical semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, the study of language acquisition, cross-linguistic comparisons, and the psychology of reasoning. Most of my research focuses on modals and modality, that is, the way languages allow us to talk about non-actual states of affair: possibilities, necessities and impossibilities. How is modality expressed across languages? What patterns and regularities do we find in how languages express modal meanings? What can that tell us about modal cognition in general? In my dissertation, “Finding Modal Force” (available here), I focus on when and how children figure out the “force” of modals: that words like can mean ‘possible’, whereas words like must mean ‘necessary’. In my first postdoc, I’ve extended this work to French.
I’m a member of the ModSquad, the UMD/NYU/elsewhere Modality Group, of the GRISP, the Groupe de Recherche sur les Inferences de la Sémantique et Pragmatique, and of the ad-hoc reading group in Paris.
I’m also engaged in a few other theoretical and experimental projects, including:
– The AMMMY project, together with researchers at the University of Cologne and Université de Caen. The project investigates the respective role of prosodic and contextual cues in speech act interpretation in French “tu peux…” (‘can you/you can…’) sentences.
– I’m working with Annemarie van Dooren on various projects, including a corpus study of when and how children figure out the ‘flavor’ dimension of modals in English, and an experimental study comparing the interpretation of past epistemic modal sentences in English, Dutch and French.
– I’m working on Actuality Entailments, specifically understanding why they can arise in the present, but only when ability modals combine with perception verbs.
– I’ve been collaborating with Ailís Cournane on behavioral experiments on English children comprehension of modals, run at NYU Child’s Lab.
My work benefits from many exchanges with colleagues and friends, in particular Annemarie van Dooren, Ailís Cournane, Morgan Moyer, Yu’an Yang, Jessica Mendes, Jad Wehbe, Keny Chatain, Milica Denić, Maria Lialiou, Malin Spaniol, Yaru Wu, and though not a linguist, Aymeric Dieuleveut. My amazing(ly) smart UMD-cohort members were Sigwan Thivierge, Mina Hirzel, Aaron Doliana, Rodrigo Ranero and Tyler Knowlton.
Anouk Dieuleveut 