About me

I am a post-doctoral researcher at Heinrich-Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, supported by a fellowship by 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 in plural?
Implicature calculation:
Why is implicature calculation sometimes sensitive to contextual factors, sometimes blind to them? Why are our best generalization about implicature calculation so computationally expensive? Can our implicature calculation algorithm be grounded in deeper principles of language (e.g. cell identification, Bayesian reasoning, Gricean maxims, etc.)?

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’.