Morwenna Hoeks

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Psycho- and Neurolinguistics lab led by Prof. dr. Nicole Gotzner at the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück. Before joining this lab, I completed my PhD at the Linguistics Department at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Broadly, my research interests lie in semantics and its interfaces. A large proportion of my work revolves around the notion of alternatives as semantic/pragmatic objects and their connection to the formation of questions, the derivation of scalar implicature, the interpretation of (free choice) disjunction, focus structure, intonation and the organization of discourse more generally. I approach this both from a formal theoretical perspective, as well as a processing perspective.

On the processing side, I'm interested in the way interpretations are built up and processed incrementally. I am particularly interested in the way that alternative sets are built on-line and how they affect the processing of foci and focus-sensitive particles. I also have some ongoing projects on the memory encoding of prosodic information, on the processing of discourse-given material and Questions-Under-Discussion, as well as the interpretation of various types of anaphora in discourse.

On the theoretical side, my work involves the way in which different alternative-generating expressions (foci, disjunctions, questions, existentials) interact to form complex meanings. I'm also interested in the question of what role prosody and intonation should play within a general theory of meaning.