Rebekah Baglini joined the IMC on November 1 as a postdoc in Linguistics. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2015, and was previously the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at Stanford University from 2015-2018. 

Rebekah is interested in how sensory and conceptual categories inform the linguistic construction of meaning, particularly at the level of words (lexical semantics).  Her current research topics span several diverse areas, including crosslinguistic variation in the encoding of states and events; the counterfactual reasoning behind causal assertions (X made/caused Y (to) happen); and the mechanisms underlying "non-arbitrariness" (when the sound of a word suggests its meaning). Her analytical work is informed by computational, corpus, and experimental evidence, as well as language variation and typology.  She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Senegal on Wolof since 2012, and has taught several classes on linguistic field methods and African languages.  

Contact:

Rebekah Baglini, School of Communication and Culture and IMC