About

Hi, my name is Alex and I am a postdoctoral research fellow on the `Making Numbers Meaningful’ project led by Bodo Winter at the University of Birmingham.

I am doing research in the field of experimental Pragmatics, and I am interested in strategic communication; for example, I focus on how speakers’ formulation choices change depending on the communicative goals they pursue.

I did my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. In my PhD project, which was supervised by Hannah Rohde and Chris Cummins, I focused on the role of presuppositions in structuring dialogue. In my thesis I looked at how speakers structure their utterances — given that they can choose to either presuppose or assert information — and how their choice influences what content bits are picked up in the subsequent dialogue. Similarly, I investigated how hearers infer whether a speaker presupposes information or not and what factors play a role in this inference process.

In my freetime, I love to sketch :)