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 a founding member and organizer 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 in 2025. 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. 

Setayesh is a formal semanticist whose interest lies at the intersection of language, logic, computation, and cognition. Her previous research has focused on topics such as aspect, negation, and the syntax-semantics of free relatives. 

She previously pursued a DPhil at the University of Oxford, where she examined free relatives in Old Iranian languages, bridging historical and theoretical linguistics. She has also been affiliated with the NegLaB (Göttingen/Frankfurt) as a doctoral fellow and was a visiting student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Setayesh earned her MSt from Oxford and her undergraduate degrees from the University of Tehran.

Rüveyda is mainly interested in formal semantics and syntax. Currently a master’s student in Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, Rüveyda works on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of Turkish alternative questions.

Rüveyda received a bachelor’s degree in theoretical linguistics from the same institution in 2023 with a bachelor’s thesis on learning algorithms and a focus on computational linguistics.

Within UNPAG, Rüveyda is looking forward to exploring polarity items and integrating crosslinguistic and experimental data with the theoretical analysis. 

Jiahao Sun is interested in formal semantics and syntax, with a particular focus on quantification, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Göttingen and recently submitted his Master’s thesis at Humboldt University of Berlin, which examined the syntax and semantics of Chinese transitivity alternations.

He has worked as a research assistant at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin and taught tutorials in syntax and semantics at the University of Göttingen. Within UNPAG, he looks forward to broadening his research on polarity items and quantification.

Luisa Kalvelage is a theoretical semanticist with a focus on the basic meaning components of natural language expressions and the behavior of lexical items outside of well-established configurations. Her research interests so far center on disjunctions and epistemic indefinites.

She obtained both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Humboldt University Berlin, where she has worked in the Department of Semantics and Pragmatics. Luisa has also been actively involved in organizing several workshops and reading groups.