NEW ICREA 
McCready, Elin
Humanities
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Department Centre de Lingüística Teòrica
Address Av. de Serragalliners, 112. Campus UAB
Postal code 08193
City Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona)
Keywords
Research interests
My research is primarily on semantics and pragmatics. In the past five years, I have focused on three main questions: the semantics and pragmatics of social meanings; the application of semantic and pragmatic tools to art and literature; and embodiment and anthropocentrism in language. The results of this work are evidenced by my record of publications, talks, awards, and grants.
Much of my current work is centered on how linguistic meaning and use interact with social structures. A recent project has been a coauthored monograph on dogwhistles within a game-theoretic model of rational communication which will appear from Oxford University Press in 2024, following on my monograph on the semantic and pragmatic treatment of honorifics in 2019, also from Oxford University Press. This research program also involves work on expressive content, discourse particles, and interactions between language and epistemology in the domains of trust and reliability. My second main area of research has been language and its relation to art and aesthetics, specifically modeling the interpretation of (literary) texts with aesthetic aims in formal semantics and pragmatics, an understudied area, and experimental literary applications of formal techniques from these areas. I recently completed a monograph on the latter topic and on non-normative interpretation more generally, now under review at Merve Verlag for publication in 2024 or 2025. One of my goals in this project is a general theory of trust in communication based on my 2015 book on reliability (Oxford), the book on dogwhistles, and my new work on aesthetic communication. This line of research also informs work I am doing in the environmental humanities, where I have been engaged in collaboration across an Asian and European network. One aspect of this work involves the possibility of narrative which centers the nonhuman and ways of doing so via extensions of the ideas of narrative and linguistic embodiment in semantic theory
