“Triggering Presuppositions”

Philippe Schlenker is a senior researcher at CNRS (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.  He was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from EHESS (Paris). He has taught at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, at the University of Southern California, at UCLA, and, since 2008, at NYU. Professor Schlenker’s early interests included semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has conducted research on indexicals  and indirect discourse, intensional semantics, anaphora, presuppositions, as well as semantic paradoxes. 

In recent work, he has advocated a program of ‘super semantics’ that seeks to expand the traditional frontiers of the field. He has investigated the semantics of sign languages, with special attention both to their logical structure and to the rich iconic means that interact with it. In order to have a point of comparison for these iconic phenomena, Professor Schlenker has also investigated the logic and typology of gestures in spoken language.  In collaborative work with primatologists and psycholinguists, he has laid the groundwork for a ‘primate semantics’ that seeks to apply the general methods of formal linguistics to primate vocalizations. And in ongoing research, he has advocated the development of a detailed semantics for music, albeit one that is very different from linguistic semantics.