From April to June 2026, Philippe Schlenker, Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris), will be a visiting scholar at ZAS funded by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The foundation awards this fellowship each year to internationally renowned scholars from all disciplines in recognition of their outstanding research achievements. Philippe Schlenker received the award in 2025 for his entire body of work in linguistics. Schlenker had previously been awarded a silver medal by the CNRS in 2021 for the originality, quality, and importance of his work. During his time at ZAS, Schlenker will be collaborating primarily in the research area “Semantics and Pragmatics.”
Among others, Schlenker will give course on the topic of “Multimodal Semantics”, consisting of six 2-hour sessions. The first lecture will take place on Wednesday, April 15, at 2:00 p.m. in the Ilse-Zimmermann-Saal at the ZAS (Pariser Straße 1, 10719, ground floor). Participation is free and open to anyone interested, but registration is required. More detailed information can be found on the lecture series’ website.
In addition, on May 8, 2026, he will give a talk on “Parasuppositions”. More details can be found here.
Schlenker was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from EHESS (Paris). He has taught at École Normale Supérieure, at the University of Southern California, at UCLA, and, between 2008 and 2025, at NYU as a Global Distinguished Professor. His early interests included semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical logic. He has conducted research on indexicals and indirect discourse, intensional semantics, anaphora, presuppositions, as well as semantic paradoxes.
In recent work, he has advocated a program of "Super Linguistics" that seeks to expand the traditional frontiers of the field. He has investigated the semantics of sign languages, with special attention both to their logical structure and to the rich iconic means that interact with it. In order to have a point of comparison for these iconic phenomena, he has also investigated the logic and typology of gestures in spoken language. In collaborative work with ethologists and psycholinguists, he has laid the groundwork for an "animal linguistics" that seeks to apply the general methods of formal linguistics to animal signals, and seeks to retrave their evolutionary history. He has also advocated the development of a detailed semantics for music, albeit one that is very different from linguistic semantics.