Paula Menéndez Benito (Marie Curie Fellow at Pompeu Fabra University, 2005 UMass PhD) is teaching an advanced level seminar on Modal Indefinites at this year’s European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI 2016) in Bolzano (Italy). The seminar is connected to Paula’s Marie Curie project on Modal Determiners, which is funded by the European Commission and hosted by Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Together with Luis Alonso Ovalle (McGill University, 2006 UMass PhD), Paula edited a related book on Epistemic Indefinites, which was published by Oxford University Press last year. From the OUP description: “This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algun: the sentence Maria se caso con algun medico (‘Maria married some doctor or other’) both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker’s inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question.”