Projects and Collaborators

Collaborators

Postdocs

Clementine Raffy, October 2022-2024, postdoc, IDEX Université Côte d'Azur, topic: 'The Realizations of Wanting in French: between Acts and Products'.

Kalle Mueller, March 2023 - 2025, two-year Feodor-Lynen fellowship, Université Côte d'Azur, topic: 'Abstract Objects in the Syntax of Natural Language'

Doctoral Students

Furkan Dikmen 2023 -  , project ANR-DFG

Arash Behboodi, IHPST, Paris 1

Visiting researchers

Keir Moulton, Professor at University of Toronto, March - April 2023, IDEX Université Côte d'Azur, research topic: 'Restrictions on Propositional Anaphora'.

New Projects

[1] CSI 2023 Volet Recherche, Université Côte d'Azur: 'The Notion of an Artifact in Semantics and in Philosophy' (ARTEFACT)

[2] DFG-ANR Project (Université Côte d'Azur / Tours - Tuebingen / Stuttgart): 'Hosting a Clause: Implications for the Matrix and its Guests', 2023-2027, financing of four three-year doctoral positions. 

Permanent project

Natural Language Ontology: A Developing Discipline

Natural Language Ontology is a new discipline that integrates metaphysics and natural language semantics and syntax. The aim of this project is to develop the foundations and methodology of natural language ontology, to set out new aims and perpectives of research within it, and to relate it to contemporary and historical pursuits in metaphysics as well as in in generative linguistics.

I consider this field of research extremely promising and exciting, given the developments in both empirical and theoretical linguistics (including syntax!) and contemporary as well as historical perspectives in metaphysics. I also consider the fondational work crucial for setting out specific research perspectives that can yielding important result, such as the distinction between core and periphery of language.

Here are my own publications focusing on natural language ontology and its foundations as such, or having a significant part that does so:

• 'Natural Language Ontology'. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford UP, New York, March 2017, online.
• 'Natural Language and its Ontology'. In A. Goldman / B. McLaughlin (eds): Metaphysics and Cognitive Science, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2019, 206-232
• 'Natural Language Ontology'. In R. Bliss/J. Miller (eds.): Routledge Handbook of Metametaphyics, 2020. 
• 'Natural Language Ontology'. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta, 2022
• 'Existence Predicates'. Synthese 197.1, 2020, 311–335 
• 'Abstract Objects and the Core-Periphery Distinction in the Ontological and Conceptual Domain of Natural Language'. In Falguera, J. L. / C. Martínez (eds.): Abstract Objects. For and Against. Synthese Library, Springer, Dordrecht, 2020, 255-276. 
• 'Levels of Ontology and Natural Language: The Case of the Ontology of Parts and Wholes'. In J. Miller (ed.): The Language of Ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021.

A lot of my work falls within natural language metaphysics, in particular my books Parts and Wholes in Semantics and Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language, but so does work by other semanticists, and so do particular types of philosophical analyses throughout the history of philosophy. Natural language ontology is both a developing field and a practice that had been pursued throughout the history of philosophy.

My 42hrs course 'Language and Ontology' at the University of Padua in the spring 2016 covered a lot of topics within this project, as did my course in Dusseldorf in the summer of 2018. I gave a series of compact seminars in Paris (IHPST) on natural language ontology (May and September 2017) and well as a tutorial at the colloquium Semantics and Philosophy in Europe in Padua (September 4-9, 2017). I taught advanced courses on the topic in Sofia (ESSLLI) and in Munich (Summer School for Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students) in the summer of 2018. In 2021, I will teach an intensive weekend course on natural language ontology at NASSLLI at Brandeis University.

Work in progress:

• 'Ontology as Part of Grammar'. In progress, 2020.
  • Abstract: This paper argues that the ontology of natural language is the object of tacit knowledge, rather than of acceptance (a form of belief) and possible rejection. As a selective ontology of the real (in a permissive or maximalist sense), it should be regarded as part of grammar in an extended sense.
• 'Object Mass Nouns and Collective Nouns', in progress, 2020