Currently, I am a lecturer/postdoc at the linguistics department of the Radboud University Nijmegen working on my Veni-project "Lexical Flexibility: formal semantics meets experimental psycholinguistics". From 2006 to 2009 I was a PhD student at the same department. I wrote my dissertation about the interpretation, production and acquisition of words. In my dissertation I argue that there is not a one-to-one relation between words and their meanings but that relations between words and meanings are determined by processes of optimization. From February to August 2010, I carried out a research project at the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, funded by a Rubicon grant. The aim of the project was to apply Optimality Theory to lexical semantics.
My linguistic interests include: (lexical) semantics and pragmatics, discourse particles, modality, linguistic theories (in particular Optimality Theory), the acquisition of meaning, language change.