We are very excited to announce that Amir Anvari, a specialist in semantics and pragmatics, will be joining our faculty in January 2022 as Assistant Professor of Linguistics! Amir comes to us from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he worked primarily with Benjamin Spector and Philippe Schlenker, receiving his M.Sc. in 2016 and PhD in 2019 (with a dissertation entitled “Meaning in Context”). Earlier, he studied math in Iran and received his B.A. in cognitive science at Carleton University in Canada (where he was introduced to linguistics by our own alum Raj Singh).
Amir has done groundbreaking work in the theory of presupposition, scalar implicatures, and indexicality, with far reaching implications for the modular organization of the human language faculty — and its interface with general systems of belief accessed for communicative purposes. He describes his interests on his webpage as follows: “I work on formal semantics and pragmatics, often on the basis of data from Farsi. I am particularly interested in various aspects of context-dependency and intensionality, alternative-based reasoning, syntax-semantics interface, and the interpretation of co-speech gestures.”
Eagerly looking forward to his arrival next year!
