The team
Hedde Zeijlstra is a university professor at the Seminar for English Philology at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, where he is part of the Linguistics in Göttingen (LinG) platform. His main interest is the relation between sentence meaning and form: how does the meaning of a sentence follow from its parts, and why are there so many different ways of expressing the same meaning across languages?
Hedde has held guest lecture appointments at, among others, Cambridge University, MIT and UCLA. Since 2017 he also has served as an associate editor of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and since 2018 as general editor of Linguistic Variation. In addition, he is a member of the editorial boards of Glossa, Linguistic Inquiry, the Journal of Linguistics, and Semantics & Pragmatics.
Jéssica Mendes is a theoretical semanticist. Her interests include future reference, mood, modality, and polarity sensitivity, often with an empirical focus on Romance.
She obtained her PhD in 2024, from the University of Maryland, in College Park. At Maryland, she was one of the founding members and organizers of Meaning at Maryland, an interdisciplinary research group with members from the departments of linguistics and philosophy. Before joining Maryland, she completed a Master's and a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil.
Ekaterina Vostrikova is a linguist and philosopher. She specializes in semantics, the syntax-semantics interface and philosophy of language.
She received her PhD in linguistics at UMass, Amherst in 2019, with a dissertation on exceptives. Her work focuses on the syntax and semantics of quantificational expressions in natural languages, specifically exploring how languages restrict the domains of quantifiers.
In addition to theoretical work, she is involved in linguistic fieldwork, particularly with Tundra Nenets, a language spoken in the Far North of Russia. Her fieldwork takes place in Naryan-Mar, a town in the Nenets Autonomous District, where she grew up.
Ziling Zhu obtained her PhD from Rutgers University–New Brunswick. As a formal and experimental semanticist, she explores the meaning of natural language by integrating theoretical analysis and experimental methods. Her research spans both the clausal and nominal domains. On the theoretical side, she focuses on topics including attitude predicates, presuppositions, question-embeddings, modal subordination, and anaphoricity.
She has also conducted experimental studies on the nominal domain, investigating the semantics of demonstratives, classifiers, and nouns. Before that, she received a B.A. at Fudan University, majoring in English and minoring in Chinese.