David Blunier

I am a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Poitiers. As a linguist, my main interests lie in semantics and pragmatics of natural languages, which basically means that I am interested in how languages express meanings, and how these meanings are affected, shaped, and enhanced by general reasoning patterns pertaining to human cognition. I recently obtained my PhD from the University of Geneva, where I defended my dissertation under the supervision of Isabelle Charnavel (Geneva) and Yasutada Sudo (University College London). My dissertation is about indexicals, those natural language expressions that refer to elements of the utterance context; more precisely, it focuses on their behavior in speech reports in both spoken and signed languages. I have been working on indexical shift, a phenomenon that describes first and second person pronouns being interpreted anaphorically in complex clauses, as well as logophoric pronouns.

A significant part of my research is dedicated to the study of sign languages and the impact of modality over linguistic meaning. In addition to my current projects on French Sign Language, I have been working on anaphora and ellipsis in Catalan Sign Language with co-author Giorgia Zorzi (Bergen), and on Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) with Evgeniia Khristoforova (Universiteit van Amsterdam), with whom I have investigated the various patterns of anaphora involved in role shift.

Other topics I’m interested in include demonstratives, implicatures and the role of alternatives and competition in natural language, co‑ and pro-speech gestures, and speech reports.

My non-academical interests are, among many, calisthenics, opera, poetry and cinema, not necessarily in that order.