SCHLENKER Philippe

Research Director, CNRS

Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

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Director of LINGUAE

Philippe Schlenker is a senior researcher at CNRS (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris). He was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris), and obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from EHESS (Paris). He has taught at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, at the University of Southern California, at UCLA, and, between 2008 and 2025, at NYU as a Global Distinguished Professor. Philippe Schlenker’s early interests included semantics, pragmatics, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has conducted research on indexicals and indirect discourse, intensional semantics, anaphora, presuppositions, as well as semantic paradoxes.

In more recent work, he has advocated a program of ’Super Semantics’ that seeks to expand the traditional frontiers of the field. He has investigated the semantics of sign languages, with special attention both to their logical structure and to the rich iconic means that interact with it. In order to have a point of comparison for these iconic phenomena, Philippe Schlenker has also investigated the logic and typology of gestures in spoken language. In collaborative work with ethologists and psycholinguists, he has laid the groundwork for an "animal linguistics" that seeks to apply the general methods of formal linguistics to diverse animal signals, from primates to birds and bees. He has also advocated the development of a detailed semantics for music,
albeit one that is very different from linguistic semantics.