S ALVADOR M ASCARENHAS — CV (FALL 2015)
St Catherine’s College, Oxford OX1 3UJ, United Kingdom, salmasc@gmail.com, http://users.ox.ac.uk/∼sfop0545/
R ESEARCH
I NTERESTS
Natural language semantics and pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, formal logic. Natural language semantics: question semantics, indefinites, tense and modality. Pragmatics: Formal pragmatics, scalar implicature. Psychology of reasoning: fallacies, mental models theory of reasoning,
heuristics and biases, question-semantics in reasoning and in cognition. Formal logic: formal logic
and mathematical elements in natural languages and cognition, philosophy of language and mind.
P ROFESSIONAL
U NIVERSITY OF OXFORD, Oxford, UK
Postdoctoral fellow with the Faculty of Philosophy
Junior Research Fellow with St. Catherine’s College
EXPERIENCE
Fall 2014 – Summer 2016
N EW YORK U NIVERSITY, New York, NY, USA
Teaching Fellow
IJN – E COLE N ORMALE S UP ÉRIEURE, Paris, France
Visiting scholar
E DUCATION
M.I.T. & H ARVARD, Cambridge, MA, USA
2005 LSA Institute
U NIVERSITY OF L ISBON, Lisbon, Portugal
‘Licenciatura’ (four-year study) in Linguistics
Fall 2009
June – August 2005
Spring 2006
New York University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
Outstanding Teacher Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
2014
University of Lisbon, Faculty of Humanities, distinction for excellence
2004
University of Lisbon merit award
G RANTS AND
F ELLOWSHIPS
February – July 2013
N EW YORK U NIVERSITY, New York, NY, USA
Summer 2014
Ph.D. in Linguistics — Dissertation:
“Formal Semantics and the Psychology of Reasoning: Building new bridges and investigating interactions”
ILLC – U NIVERSITEIT VAN A MSTERDAM, Amsterdam, Netherlands
MSc in Logic — Thesis: “Inquisitive Semantics and Logic”
H ONORS AND
AWARDS
Summer 2014
John Fell Fund, Oxford. Project: A question-based approach to reasoning
and decision making, with Philipp Koralus, Amount: GBP 6,251.55.
2004, 2003
2015
New York University GSAS Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship
2013 – 2014
MacCracken Fellowship — NYU
2008 – 2013
Huygens Scholarship Program, The Netherlands
Funding for my Master’s studies at the ILLC
2007 – 2008
P UBLICATIONS
Mascarenhas, S. and P. Koralus. under revision. Illusory inferences in reasoning with quantifiers.
Koralus, P. and S. Mascarenhas. under review. Illusory Inferences and the Erotetic Theory of
Reasoning.
Mascarenhas, S. 2015. Complementizer doubling in European Portuguese. Forthcoming in Rivista
di grammatica generativa.
Koralus, P. and S. Mascarenhas. 2013. The erotetic theory of reasoning: bridges between formal
semantics and the psychology of deductive inference. Philosophical Perspectives 27, pp. 312–365.
Mascarenhas, S. 2011. Licensing by modification: the case of positive polarity pronouns. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16.
Peres, J. and S. Mascarenhas. 2006. Notes on sentential connections (predominantly) in Portuguese.
Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, vol. 5(1).
R EFEREED
C ONFERENCE
P RESENTATIONS
Mascarenhas, S. and P. Koralus. 2015. Illusory inferences: disjunctions, indefinites, and the erotetic
theory of reasoning. Presented at the 37th Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting CogSci 2015,
published in conference proceedings.
Mascarenhas, S. and P. Koralus. 2015. Reasoning with quantifiers beyond syllogisms: Illusory
inferences with indefinites and the Erotetic Theory of Reasoning. Presented at the 41st Annual
Meeting of The Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Mascarenhas, S. 2013. An interpretation-based account of illusory inferences from disjunction.
Presented at Sinn und Bedeutung XVIII.
Mascarenhas, S. 2011. Licensing by modification: the case of positive polarity pronouns. Presented
at Sinn und Bedeutung XVI.
Mascarenhas, S., A. Nevins and A. Killimangalam. 2005. Exceptions as reanalysis in Portuguese
vowel height alternations. Presented at XXII Meeting of the Portuguese Linguistics Society (APL).
I NVITED TALKS
2015. Illusory inferences: reasoning and interpretation. Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, May 2015.
2015. Illusory inferences: reasoning and interpretation. Harvard Linguistics, Mar. 2015.
2014. The conjunction fallacy as reasoning about ignorance. Oxford’s Jowett Society, Nov. 2014.
2013. An interpretation-based account of illusory inferences from disjunction. New York Philosophy
of Language Workshop, October 2013.
2012. Toward an interpretation-based account of reasoning failures. MIT’s LF Reading Group,
November 2012.
2012. Inquisitive semantics and positive polarity. Invited lecture at Philosophy of Language graduate seminar, Washington University in St. Louis, February 2012.
2010. Contextual givenness vs. existential quantification. Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in
Meaning. UPenn, April 2010.
T EACHING
E XPERIENCE
ESSLLI 2016 — B OLZANO -B OZEN
Instructor for week 2 course The Role of Linguistic Interpretation in Human Failures of Reasoning
S T. C ATHERINE ’ S C OLLEGE , U NIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Tutor (undergraduate) for Philosophy of Logic and Language, HT 2014. Introduction to Logic,
MT 2015. Semantics and Pragmatics, MT 2015. Co-lecturer (graduate) (with Philipp Koralus)
for Topics in Mind and Language: reasoning, judgment, and experiments for philosophers, graduate
seminar, Hillary Term 2015.
N EW YORK U NIVERSITY
Co-lecturer (with Emily Nguyen) for Language (introduction to linguistics), Summer 2012. Colecturer (with Dániel Szeredi) for Etymology, Fall 2013. Teaching assistant for Profs. Maria
Gouskova (Spring 2010, Language), Chris Barker (Spring 2011, Intro Semantics), Anna Szabolcsi
and Brian McElree (Fall 2011, Language and Mind), Mark Baltin (Fall 2012, Language), and Lucas
Champollion (Spring 2014, Language).
ESSLLI 2008 — H AMBURG
Teaching assistant to Prof. Jeroen Groenendijk in the course Alternative Logical Semantics.
ILLC — M ASTER OF L OGIC P ROGRAM
Teaching assistant for Prof. Jeroen Groenendijk’s Semantics and Pragmatics course.
ACADEMIC
S ERVICE
Refereeing service: Semantics and Pragmatics; SALT (Semantics and Linguistic theory); Synthese; Journal of Logic, Language, and Information; LINGUA; Review of Philosophy and Psychology; Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge; Indian Conference on Logic and its
Applications.
SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory) 2014 program committee and co-organizer; NYU Linguistics Colloquium co-organizer (2009-2012); NYU Semantics Group organizer; ESSLLI 2008
Student Session co-chair.
L ANGUAGE S KILLS Portuguese (native)
English
(native proficiency)
VARIA
French
German
(fluent)
(intermediate)
Latin
(fluent in reading)
Programming skills: Proficient in Prolog, C, R, and LATEX.
Non-academic: I am a classically trained pianist and singer, still performing occasionally as a
singer in choirs and small opera productions.