Brian Buccola

Biography

Ph.D., McGill University

Brian Buccola specializes in formal semantics and pragmatics, with further interests in syntax, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science more generally. His research explores how human languages encode meaning, how humans put linguistic meanings to use, and whether (and to what extent) non-human animals have similar capacities. He is particularly interested in the ways that humans reason about what their interlocutor could have said but chose not to, thereby drawing various inferences, and whether such inferential reasoning is language- or even human-specific. His published work has appeared in Semantics and Pragmatics, Journal of Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy, Frontiers in Psychology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He previously held research positions at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.