Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. I am interested in formal models of language and meaning and whether they can be applied to understand the interactions of non-human animals.

During my PhD, I mostly worked on the question of how meaning arises (semantics) and how we use language to communicate (pragmatics). In particular, I conducted research on question meaning and how this can be derived from prosody. I also have work on imperatives and the Macedonian Q-particle li.

My dissertation is about form-to-meaning mapping in alternative questions and is written within the dfg funded project Questions at the Interfaces.

Currently, I am discovering my inner anthropologist and conduct fieldwork at farms and petting zoos to better understand how cows interact with each other and with humans. Based on this work, I explore whether models of speech acts and compositionality can be applied to these interactions.

Publications

Dissertation

• Meertens, Erlinde. (2021). Alternative Questions: from Form to Meaning.

Journal Publications

• Beltrama, Andrea, Meertens, Erlinde, & Romero, Maribel. (2020). Alternative Questions: Distinguishing between Negated and Complementary Disjuncts. Semantics and Pragmatics, 13, 5

Conference Proceedings

• Meertens, Erlinde. (2019). How prosody disambiguates between Alternative and Polar Questions. In Julian J. Schlöder, Dean McHugh & Floris Roelofsen (eds.) Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, p. 299-308.
• Meertens, Erlinde, Egger, Sophie & Romero, Maribel. (2019). The role of multiple accent in alternative questions. In M.Teresa Espinal et al. (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, vol. 2, pp. 179–196. 2019.
• Meertens, Erlinde. (2019). Prosody in Disjunctive Questions: Introducing Class. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 25(1), 21.
• Beltrama, Andrea, Meertens, Erlinde, & Romero, Maribel. (2018). Decomposing cornering effects in alternative questions: An Experimental Investigation. In Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22.

Talks

Invited talks

• Meertens, Erlinde. (2025). Non-human animal pragmatics: The case of dairy cows. Leibnitz University, Hannover. July 1st.
• Meertens, Erlinde. (2018). Plateau Rise in Disjunctive Questions. ILLC Inquisitive Semantics seminar, University of Amsterdam. November 23rd.
• Meertens, Erlinde. (2018). Q-Particles in Alternative Questions. Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna . March 19th.

Workshops & Conferences (unpublished)

• Jordanoska, Izabela & Meertens, Erlinde. (2020). Focus marking strategies in polar questions in Macedonian. Talk presented at Workshop Focus Alternatives: Theoretical and empirical perspectives, Humboldt Universität Berlin, February, 27-28.
• Jordanoska, Izabela & Meertens, Erlinde. (2018). The Interpretive Contribution of li in Macedonian. Talk presented at Balkan Languages and Dialects: Corpus-Based and Quantitative Studies. St. Petersburg. October 18-20.
• Meertens, Erlinde & Lauer, Sven. (2018). Crosslinguistic variation in a minor sentence type: Melioratives in Dutch and German. Talk presented at Workshop on Non Canonical Imperatives, Humboldt Universität Berlin, May 25 - 26
• Meertens, E. (2016). Scalar Implicatures for Modified Numerals. Talk presented at the De Grote Taaldag. Utrecht, the Netherlands, February 6th.
• Landsbergen, F., Wouden, T. van der, Engeland, J. van, Meertens, E. & Wijsman, S. (2015). Enriching a grammatical database with intelligent links to linguistic resources, demo & poster at the CLARIN 2015 Conference, Wroclaw, Poland, 16 October.