Dr Napoleon Katsos
My research is in the area of semantics and pragmatics, especially in the meaning of quantifiers, number words, logical connectives, and definite expressions. I am particularly interested in how developmental and experimental research can inform theoretical linguistic inquiry and vice versa.
One of my main interests, which I am exploring in collaboration with Dorothy Bishop and Clara Andrés Roqueta, is the acquisition of quantification and informativeness by typically-developing children, as well as by children with Specific Language Impairment. I am also interested in the acquisition of quantifiers crosslinguistically. Together with colleagues at COST Action A33 and COST Action ISO804, we are working on a novel dataset from 22 languages in order to identify any universal patterns in the process of language acquisition - which may further be used to develop crosslinguistically applicable tests of language impairment.
If you would like to know more about this, see the relevant items on the projects page, and feel free to read some of my work. There you can also find information about other research interests, such as the on-line comprehension of implicatures (in collaboration with Richard Breheny and Heather Ferguson), and the acquisition of informativeness by very young children (in collaboration with Gerlind Grosse and Ira Noveck). Or you may want to read about work I am doing with Advaith Siddharthan investigating the psycholinguistic properties of different ways of expressing discourse relations.
I am pleased to supervise graduate students who wish to work on these and related topics. See the teaching page for some information on the courses I give at RCEAL. You can also download the content of some summer school lectures I have given. You may also want to see what my PhD students, Chris Cummins and Cat Davies are working on.