Dr. Morwenna Hoeks

Morwenna is a postdoctoral researcher in the SPA lab, and she is interested in the way people construct meaning from linguistic structure in real time. To get at this, she works in both theoretical semantics/pragmatics as well as psycholinguistics. A large proportion of her work revolves around the notion of alternatives (things that speakers could have said out loud but didn't) and their connection to the formation of questions, the interpretation of (free choice) disjunction, focus structure, intonation and the organization of discourse more generally. Before joining the SPA lab, she completed a PhD at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she wrote a dissertation on the processing of focus and the incremental construction of alternative sets. She also has ongoing projects on the interpretation and processing of anaphora, filler-gap dependencies, contrastive topics, and scope.

Link to her personal website

Selected publications

M. Hoeks, M. Toosarvandani and A. Rysling (2023). Processing of linguistic focus depends on contrastive alternatives. Journal of Memory and Language (132): 104444. doi: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X23000438?via%3Dihub

M. Hoeks (2021). The role of focus marking in disjunctive questions: A QUD-based approach. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 30: 654-673. doi: https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/30.654

T. Schmitz, J. Dotlačil, R. Nouwen, J. Winkowski & M. Hoeks (2024). Semantic accessibility and interference in pronoun resolution. Glossa Psycholinguistics, 3(1): 1, 1-58. doi: escholarship.org/uc/item/0bv8k263

M. Hoeks and F. Roelofsen (2019). Coordinating questions: The scope puzzle. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 29: 562-581. doi: journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/article/view/29.562

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