Matthijs Westera is an assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

More information about Matthijs Westera

Research

My research is focused on implicit questions. [Implicit question: "What are implicit questions?"] These are the things that people become curious about as they read a text or hear someone speak. (Alternatively, they are the things that writers/speakers think their addressees *should* become curious about, which may not always happen...)

How we interpret what someone says, depends a great deal on what sort of implicit question we think they are answering. This is a form of implicit meaning. Moreover, implicit questions are reflected, in various ways, by the intonation speakers use.

I teach courses in Logic, Semantics, and Computational Linguistics, and supervise students on these topics.

Publications