Philippe Schlenker (our Global Distinguished Professor) was recently elected to Academia Europaea. Independently, he was just awarded an Advanced Grant (5 years) from the European Research Council. 

Entitled "Sources of Meaning: Grounding Formal Semantics", this project proposes to extend the breadth and explanatory depth of formal semantic theories by testing them against understudied objects, some of them linguistic (sign languages), some paralinguistic (gestures), and some non-linguistic (music, animal signals).  The project will determine how the typology of semantic operations extends to these objects, it will investigate their cognitive underpinnings, and it will explore possible evolutionary connections among operations found in speech, sign, human and non-human gestures, and music.