Term 1 Courses

Tim Jantarungsee is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics specialising in formal semantics and endangered language documentation. His research interests include the semantics of modal "ability" expressions, cross-linguistic lexical semantics of "eating" predicates, fieldwork methodology, language policy and decolonising linguistics, working with minoritised languages in East and South-East Asia.

Session 1: Wednesday 29th October, 14:00 - 15:00, CH G06

This session will cover all the empirical properties of presuppositions, distinguishing them from other types of implications and talk a little about the history and overview some of the core theories (will dive deeper into them in the following weeks). Theories of presupposition straddle the line between formal semantics & pragmatics, so one of the goals will be to try and make that line explicit so we can see exactly how they interface.

Readings:

• If you have little time and are lazy: Beaver & Geurts (2014) Presupposition In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• If you have a bit more time but you're still kinda lazy: Chapters 5 of Kadmon (1990) Formal Pragmatics
• If you're a nerd: both the above + Karttunen & Peters (1979) Conventional implicature; Geurts (1999) Presuppositions and pronouns (first part); Beaver (2001) Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics (part 1).

Handout: Presuppositions-session-1.pdf

Session 2: Thursday 30th October, 11:00 - 12:00, CH G06

Topic: Satisfaction Theory I

This session, I will introduce Heim's dynamic semantics (File Change Semantics) and its application towards explaining the projection problem.

Readings:

• If you have little and are lazy: Heim (1988) On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions
• If you have a bit more time, but you're still rather lazy: Above reading + Kadmon (1990) Chapter 6
• If you're a nerd: Both of the above + Rothschild (2011), Explaining presupposition projection with dynamic semantics; Beaver (2001), Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics Part II; Heim (1982), The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases

Handout: Presuppositions-session-2.pdf

Session 3: Thursday 6th November, 11:00 - 12:00, Room 101

Topic: Satisfaction Theory II

This session I will talk more about Satisfaction Theory. Specifically, how it deals with projection through quantification, which is a tricky and complex topic. I will also talk about the criticisms towards Satisfaction Theory, which have typically been grouped together to be known as the 'proviso problem'.

Readings:

• Readings this session are the same as last session, but also include:
• Geurts (1996). Local satisfaction guaranteed: A presupposition theory and its problems.
• Mandelkern (2016). Dissatisfaction theory.

Handout: Presuppositions-session-3.pdf

Session 4: Thursday 13th November, 11:00 - 12:00, Room 204, 40 Bernard Street

Topic: Trivalent Theories & the Definite Descriptor

This session we will explore trivalent theories of presupposition and examine the semantics of definite descriptions.

Readings:

• Coppock & Champollion (2025) Invitation to Formal Semantics, pp. 328-358
• Beaver (2001) Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics, Chapter 2

Handout: Presuppositions-session-4.pdf

Session 5: Thursday 27th November, 11:00 - 12:00, Chandler House, Room G06

Topic: Cross-linguistic presupposition

This session we will look at presuppositions from a cross-linguistic perspective and try and determine whether or not the data actually informs our semantic/pragmatic theories. We will also consider how exactly we would elicit data on presuppositions if we were to do semantic fieldwork on the topic.

Note: I understand that I'm changing the topic really late so I don't expect anyone to really have time to do the readings. Don't worry though, I'll be sure to summarise everything well in the handout.

Readings:

• Lisa Matthewson. Presuppositions and Cross-Linguistic Variation. 2006.
• Lisa Matthewson. Pronouns, Presuppositions, and Semantic Variation. 2009.

Handout: Presuppositions-session-5.pdf

Session 6: Thursday 27th November, 11:00 - 12:00, CH G06

Topic: Middle Kleene and bi-dimensional semantic accounts of presupposition

This session I will finish off trivalent semantic theories for presuppositions by talking about the more niche Middle Kleene. Then, we will take a look at the classical bi-dimensional semantic account for presuppositions.

Readings:

• Benjamin R. George. Some remarks on certain trivalent accounts of presupposition projection (2014)
• Karttunen, Lauri & Stanley Peters. Conventional implicature (1979)
• Kadmon (2001) - sections on the Karttunen & Peters account

Handout: Presuppositions-session-6.pdf

Session 7: Thursday 11th December, 17:00 - 18:00, CH B07

Topic: Presuppositions as Anaphora and Proof-Theoretic Semantics

Quite a few authors (Heim included!) have noted that presuppositions behave in certain ways like anaphora, to the point that some have proposed that they be given a fully unified treatment. This session, we'll take a look at an approach to presupposition that assumes they are linked up or bound to previously established discourse referents, and hence are just like pronouns.

Inspired by this, I'll also discuss an interesting body of work in "Proof-Theoretic" semantics that treats any anaphoric link as a proof. As such, binding and accommodation can be reduced to a process of proof search. This view has some interesting and useful consequences, especially in cases where an inference is required to establish an anaphoric link, such as the example below:

(1) If John buys a car, he checks the motor first.

Readings:

• van der Sandt (1992), Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution
• Krahmer and Piwek (1999), Presupposition Projection as Proof Construction
• Geurts, Beaver and Maier (2024), Discourse Representation Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Handout: Presuppositions-session-7.pdf

Abdullah Almuhaysh is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics specialising in the morphosyntax of Arabic tense and aspect. He also delves into phonology (autosegmental morphophonology) and the formal semantics of tense and aspect in order to account for modern Arabic dialects and how they lexicalise their VPs and auxiliaries.

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies words by asking questions such as: What are words? How are they structured? The aim of this course is to familiarise students with crosslinguistic morphological phenomena and terminology before tackling work on theoretical frameworks. We will also consider how syntax, semantics, and phonology are related to morphology. Thus, this class is a buffet that invites the students to sample the delicious dishes of morphology in hopes of indulging into them further in the future.

Session 1: What Is Morphology About?

5th November, 15:00-16:00, Room 201 Chandler House

We will begin the first session by easing our way in and introducing key terminology about morphology. This should serve either as an appetizer to totally new students, or a refresher to students familiar with the different morphological units (such as morphemes). We will also briefly look at the inflection vs derivational dichotomy, as well as the concept of allomorphy.

Session 2: More Morphological Phenomena

12th November, 15:00-16:00, Room G03 Chandler House

During the second session, we will explore general morphological phenomena, such as borrowing, compounding, and clipping. However, we will consider very interesting phenomena such as suppletion, syncretism, word classes (such as gender), and zero morphology.

Session 3: The Morphology and Phonology Interface: Autosegmental (Morpho)phonology

19th November, 15:00-16:00, Room 301 Chandler House

During the third session, we will tackle the problem of non-concatenative morphology: Cases where morphological operations seem to be disjoined, unlike English's dominantly concatenative morphology (base-suffix patterns). We will focus greatly on languages such as Arabic and how they employ templatic morphology in order insert disjoined affixes. We will see how morphological affixation is not restricted to consonants and vowels, but also to suprasegmental elements such as tone and stress, and subsegmentals such as phonological features (+nasal, -plosive, etc).

Session 4: Morphosyntax: The Morphology and Syntax Interface

26th November, 17:00-18:00, Room 201 Chandler House

During the fourth session, we will ponder the status of morphology and syntax. We will see how they are similar in their structuring (constituents in words and sentences). We will also take a closer look at morphosyntactic phenomena such as agreement and concord, Mark Baker 1985's mirror principle, verbal auxiliary data, and an interesting morphophonology constraint on the comparative and superlative morphosyntax of Hasawi Arabic.

Session 5: Morphological Universals: *ABA and Greenberg Universal 20 in Morphology

3rd December, 15:00-16:00, Room 201 Chandler House

In the final session, we will consider two postulated universal constraints in morphology: Bobaljik 2012's *ABA constraint and Kloudova 2020's take of Greenberg Universal 20 in morphology. We will see how these constraints are related to phenomena such as syncretism, suppletion, and morphological containment. Finally, we will point towards an entrance to morphological theory before concluding the course.

Term 2 Courses

Erying Qin is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics working on experimental pragmatics, which aims to use methodologies drawn from experimental psychology to investigate current theories of semantics and pragmatics for human language. Her doctoral work focuses on scalar inferences for different scalar words, particularly for paucal quantifiers.

Dr. Shenshen Wang recently completed her PhD in Linguistics at UCL. Her doctoral research focuses on theories of negation processing, examining current models and investigating how various factors influence negation comprehension using methods drawn from experimental psychology.

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics concerned with context-dependent meaning, in contrast to semantics, which deals with the meaning of words and sentences in isolation. As a relatively new research area, experimental pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics that uses empirical, experimental methods to study how meaning is shaped by factors such as the speaker's intentions, the listener's interpretation, the context of the conversation, and social norms. In this module, we consider examples of research topics in experimental pragmatics (e.g., scalar inferences, negation, and questions) as well as the cognitive mechanisms used to investigate theories in pragmatics.

Day 1: Introduction to experimental pragmatics

Monday 16th February 2026, 14:00-15:00, Chandler House Room 116

In the first half of this session, we will introduce experimental pragmatics and its research topics in general. In the second half, we will examine a commonly studied pragmatic phenomenon, Scalar Inference (or Scalar Implicature), along with the corresponding experimental studies.

Day 2: Why Are Negative Sentences Hard to Process?

Tuesday 17th February 2026, 14:00-15:00, Chandler House Room 116

This session will present various experimental findings and review current accounts of negation processing. Why are negative sentences generally more demanding to process than affirmative ones? How can we explain this difficulty? Specifically, we will explore the extra cognitive effort required to interpret negative sentences and examine the role that positive arguments play in this process.

Day 3: Context and More: Open Questions for the Dynamic Pragmatic Theory

Wednesday 18th February 2026, 14:00-15:00, Chandler House Room 116

In this session, we will introduce and evaluate the dynamic pragmatic view of negation processing, drawing on evidence from various experimental pragmatics tasks. In particular, we will focus on a study of the sentence-picture verification task. Additionally, we will review many factors at play in verification tasks when negation is involved, highlighting how these factors may influence the processes in negation comprehension.

Day 4: Question: what questions tell us about pragmatic language skills

Thursday 19th February 2026, 14:00-15:00, Chandler House Room 116

This session explores what questions can tell us about pragmatic language skills. It provides insight into (experimental) pragmatics from the perspective of questions. The game Guess Who, which helps develop pragmatic language skills, including turn-taking, formulating targeted questions, and deductive reasoning, will be introduced.

Day 5: Perspective-taking in implicature derivation: what developmental studies tell us about pragmatic inferences

Friday 20th February 2026, 14:00-15:00, Chandler House Room 116

By now, you have probably realised that implicature derivation is a central topic in pragmatics, and that experimental pragmatics investigates how interlocutors behave in tasks designed to test it. In this session, we will look at developmental research on implicature derivation/inferences. Since pragmatics concerns how meaning varies depending on the speaker's and listener's perspectives, and since there are usually developmental differences in perspective-taking between children and adults, research that incorporates these factors adds another piece to the puzzle of pragmatic inference.

Andrew La is a second year PhD student at UCL Linguistics. His research project involves mapping out the structure of noun phrases in Vietnamese. His main interests include adjective ordering, NP ellipsis, and argument ellipsis.

In this short course we will be looking at one type of ellipsis: ellipsis in noun phrases. We will first look at the general properties of NPE as an introductory overview. Then we will address three different aspects of NPE before finishing with a brief look at NPE in classifier languages.

Session 1: Introduction to NPE

25th February 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 116 Chandler House

This session will be an introduction to the phenomenon of NPE as a type of ellipsis, including the general syntactic behaviour of NPE compared to other types of ellipsis and other phenomena involving empty categories. I will also present the main questions in NPE research as a pre-empt for the coming sessions.

Session 2: The nature of the gap in NPE

4th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 116 Chandler House

We will examine the characteristics (syntactic behaviour and size) of the gap resulted by NPE through different analyses in the existing literature.

Session 3: Deriving the gap in NPE

11th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 116 Chandler House

This session addresses the question of how the gap is generated when NPE happens. Again, we will be looking at various accounts in the literature.

Session 4: Licensing of NPE

18th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 116 Chandler House

Session 4 covers one of the most important issues: how is the gap licensed? We will be looking at multiple formulations of the licensing conditions for NPE.

Session 5: NPE in classifier languages

25th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 116 Chandler House

In the final session we take a detour from the abstract theoretical questions and dive into NPE research in classifier languages.

Saki is an MPhil student interested in an interdisciplinary approach to meaning. She's specifically interested in the nature of word meaning and concepts, drawing from perspectives in Pragmatics, Semantics, Philosophy of Language, Cognitive Science, and Applied Linguistics. Her current research looks at how polysemy and figurative meaning can provide us with valuable insight into understanding the nature of language and thought.

Pragmatics is typically characterized as the study of meaning in use, linguistic meaning within a given context. The goal for this 5-week course is to introduce some different contexts and illustrate how we can apply pragmatic theory to better understand the nature of meaning in the world beyond. We will be hearing from UCL Linguistics alumni about how they connected their linguistics background to their current work and studies in law and education.

Session 1: Slurs and the 'Pejoration treadmill'

Thursday 26th February 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room B07 Chandler House

In this first week I will focus on a pragmatic analysis of my proposed sub-type of slurs and pejoratives. I will connect this linguistic analysis with research in social anthropology and evolutionary psychology to better understand the motivations behind why slurs are pervasive across time, across cultures, and are constantly evolving.

Hedi Baghi is studying her PGDL at the University of Law after having graduated from UCL with a BA in Linguistics. She is interested in how legal uncertainties and disputes are linguistically rooted and addressed with Semantic and Pragmatic mechanisms such as presupposition, contextual enrichment, and inference. Her dissertation examined how Relevance Theory can be applied to analyse ambiguities in the language of wills and probates. She thinks that linguists would be excellent lawyers because legal disputes hinge not only on the facts of a case, but on linguistic fidelity.

Session 2: Linguistics as a Foundation for Legal Reasoning I

Thursday 5th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 201 Chandler House

Introduction to how linguistics lends itself well to the study of law. Many legal scholars argue that linguistic principles offer limited guidance for legal interpretation. In the following two talks, I wish to demonstrate otherwise.

Session 3: Linguistics as a Foundation for Legal Reasoning II

Thursday 12th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 201 Chandler House

Last week's tools are applied to real judgements in a debated area of law: psychiatric injury. The law has been inconsistently applied in this area, and I want to demonstrate that Relevance Theory allows us to tease out why.

Grace Buckingham is currently doing her MA in Applied Linguistics at the IOE and graduated from the Linguistics Department last year with a BA in Linguistics. She is interested in Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Linguistic Variation. Her dissertation work is investigating the link between linguistic forms and specific therapeutic techniques and shared registers.

Session 4: Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Speech Act Theory

Thursday 19th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 201 Chandler House

This week, I will give a general introduction to Discourse studies after introducing myself and experience in linguistics. We will cover how discourse is conceptualised, researched, and analysed through various approaches and cover Austin and Searle's Speech Act Theory. I will discuss potential applications of pragmatics to other areas of Applied Linguistics and answer any questions you may have.

Xinxin Yan is a linguist specialising in theoretical and experimental pragmatics. Her research investigates how people interpret and produce figurative language—such as similes, metaphors, and metonymy—using behavioural and eye-tracking methods. She is currently leading an NLP project developing computational models to automatically detect figurative expressions in running text.

Session 5: Pragmatics: The Key That Opens the Door to Implicature — and So Much More

Thursday 26th March 2026, 16:00-17:00, Room 201 Chandler House

This session explores why certain lines in novels, poems, film dialogue, and lyrics feel unusually powerful: they seem to "say more than they say." We'll use pragmatic theory to unpack how readers/listeners build implicatures, enrich meanings, and derive affective/aesthetic effects from such utterances.

Optional Readings:

• Core pragmatics:
  • Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation.
  • Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition (selected chapters on relevance and inference).
• Figurative language in pragmatics / Relevance Theory:
  • Wilson, D. & Carston, R. (2006). "Metaphor, relevance and the 'emergent property' issue."
  • Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and Utterances.
• Linking pragmatics to literary "poetic effects":
  • Pilkington, A. (2000). Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective.

Term 3 Courses

Term 3 course details will be announced soon. Join our mailing list to stay updated!