Anouk Dieuleveut

I am 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’m interested in theoretical and experimental semantics and pragmatics. More specifically, my research focuses on modals, with a special focus on child language acquisition. I’m a (proud!) member of the GRISP, the Groupe de Recherche sur les Inferences de la Sémantique et Pragmatique, and of the ModSquad, the UMD/NYU/elsewhere Modality Group.

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. 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 means ‘possible’, whereas words like must means ‘necessary’. 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.

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, Milica Denić, Keny Chatain, Maria Lialiou, Malin Spaniol, Yaru Wu, and thought not a linguist, Aymeric Dieuleveut. My amazing(ly) smart UMD-cohort members were Sigwan Thivierge, Mina Hirzel, Aaron Doliana, Rodrigo Ranero and Tyler Knowlton.