Keny Chatain

About me

I am a post-doctoral researcher at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, supported by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. You can contact me at keny.chatain@gmail.com.

The questions that haunt me:

• Semantics of pronouns and anaphors:
  Under what conditions can a noun phrase serve as a pronoun’s antecedent? What is the division of labour between grammatical constraints and extra-grammatical constraints (e.g. pragmatics, processing, etc.) in pronoun reference and resolution? What drives the existential/universal ambiguity in donkey pronouns? Can we derive context-change potentials of elements from their truth-conditions only?
• Semantics of plurality, distributivity and cumulativity:
  What is the complete inventory of operators and combinators needed to provide an adequate semantics for pluralities? What is the origin of homogeneity gaps in plural?
• Semantics/Pragmatics:
  What is encoded in semantic representations? What does the grammar encode? How are representations used by rational speakers?

How I pronounce my name: [keˈni^h ʃaˈtɛ̃].
If it’s easier for you, feel free to anglicize it. Here’s one way to do so: [ˈk^hɛnɪ (t)ʃəˈtɛɪn].
It’s not a typo: my first name is indeed spelled with just one ‘n’.