Eva B. Poortman

Hi! Welcome to the webpage of a young researcher interested in linguistics and its  connections to cognitive psychology.

I’m currently working as a PhD candidate at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (Utrecht University) in the Netherlands, under supervision of Yoad Winter in the NWO-funded VICI project Between Logic and Common Sense: The Formal Semantics of Words. My research falls within the areas of (conceptual) semantics and psycholinguistics and focuses on the effects of typicality on the interpretation of logical expressions.

Research interests: binary concepts, reasoning, categorization and typicality, vagueness, reciprocity, conjunction, plurality

Personal interests: baking, traveling, music, (baby) animals, literature, pajamas, black coffee

Currently reading: The book of disquiet (Fernando Pessoa), Embracing the wide sky (Daniel Tammet)

Workshop!

What to do if there aren’t many workshops or conferences devoted to your specific area of interest? Organize your own! As part of the VICI project “Between Logic and Common Sense“, and in conjunction with the X-PRAG 2013 conference, we are organizing a workshop on Concept Composition & Experimental Semantics/Pragmatics on 2-3 September, 2013.

Invited Speakers:
Stephen Crain (Macquarie University)
James Hampton (City University London)
Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart, University of Texas at Austin)

Keep an eye on the workshop website for more details!

Whereabouts

- I’ll be running pilot experiments on plural predicate conjunctive sentences at the UiL OTS labs in week 41 (8-12 October). And the experiments are fully booked, yay!
- Together with Marijn Struiksma and Yoad Winter I’m writing a paper on experiments that we did on typicality and the interpretation of reciprocal sentences..
- I’ll be teaching an undergrad course from November 2012 until February 2013, on communication in drum languages: secondary modes of linguistic communication.

- Upcoming talks:

• The effect of typicality on the interpretation of sentences. Linguistischer Arbeitskreis (LAK), University of Cologne, 31 October 2012.
• Typicality matters: Experimental work on the effects of typicality on interpretation. Uiltjesdagen, UiL OTS, Utrecht, 20 November 2012.