I'm a Professor in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh.

Research Blurb:
I work in the area of experimental pragmatics, which addresses (from various vantage points) questions of how communication works in context. I'm interested in ambiguity — how messages get formulated and how listeners recover speakers' intended meaning. I've worked on topics such as reference, coherence, implicature, presupposition, and deception, typically using psycholinguistic methods to analyse language processing. This has been made possible via a number of nice collaborations with linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists.

My work focuses particularly on speaker and listeners' expectations. For example, for a conversation to be coherent, we expect more than just a sequence of arbitrary sentences — we expect the sentences to connect in predictable and sensible ways. At the same time, if everything a speaker said were entirely predictable, there'd be no new information conveyed. These two expectations — one for coherence, one for informativity — underlie a lot of what I've studied on cooperative (and uncooperative) communication.