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 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, 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.