I’m a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics and Banting fellow at ZAS. I specialize in semantics and pragmatics.
Most of my work focuses on exhaustification, predicate meanings, and the relation between language and thought. I’m interested in using the tools of formal semantics to learn more about how language interacts with other aspects of cognition, such as conceptual representations. For example, I have argued that in most sentences, there are systematic mismatches between the intuited and underlying meanings of conceptual vocabulary like nouns and adjectives.
Previously, I was at the University of Calgary as a postdoctoral researcher, and at McGill as a Vanier scholar, where I defended my thesis in 2022.
In my spare time I enjoy studying languages, social movement organising, and time outdoors. I’m a native French speaker from a minority community in Winnipeg, Canada.
Get in touch! mathieu.paille (at) mail.mcgill.ca.
selected publications
L&P
An interaction between logical vocabulary and predicate meanings
Predicates within many conceptual classes are intuited as mutually exclusive. Based on these predicates’ interaction with logical vocabulary like and or also, however, this paper argues that they are in fact underlyingly consistent; the strong intuited meanings arise from semantic exhaustification. In addition to demonstrating that exhaustification is more widespread than previously believed, this paper also shows that this particular exhaustification effect behaves in a hitherto undescribed manner. Indeed, a predicate’s exhaustification is always computed locally at the level of the predicate, rather than the clause or sentence containing it.
JoS
Co-predications and the quantificational force of summative predicates
In the literature on homogeneity, summative predicates have been described as quantifying universally over their argument’s parts in positive sentences, while being negated existentials in negative sentences. In this article, I provide a fuller picture of these predicates’ quantificational force in positive sentences through various ’co-predications’—sentences in which two summative predicates are predicated of the same individual. In some co-predications, summative predicates are universal; in others, they are weaker, while remaining stronger than existential. In light of this new empirical paradigm, I suggest that summative predicates are lexically existential, but are exhaustified so as to exclude other same-class predicates. In addition to making this proposal, I also show that no other theory of homogeneity can capture the co-predicational paradigm.
