dr Marcin Wągiel

I am a semanticist working on the relationship between the form and the meaning of morphologically complex expressions. I am most intrigued with seeking to identify universal properties of that aspect of language faculty that is dedicated to the notion of part-whole. The main focus of my investigations is on Slavic and Germanic, but I also explore Romance, East Asian and some understudied languages.  

I studied Polish studies and Slavic languages at the University of Silesia in Katowice and Jagiellonian University in Cracow as well as general linguistics at the Masaryk University in Brno. In 2019, I defended a Ph.D. thesis on subatomic quantification in natural language, i.e., quantification over parts of singular objects, which received the E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize.

I worked in the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages at the Masaryk University in Brno, in the Institute of Polish Language at the University of Warsaw and in the Department of Slavic Languages at the Palacký University in Olomouc. I also spent some time at the University of Vienna and Humboldt University of Berlin.

My research focuses on topics in compositional semantics, morphosemantics and syntax-semantics interface, often from a cross-linguistic perspective. I work on part-whole structures, quantification, plurality, collectivity, distributivity, modification, genericity, comparison, and event semantics. In my research, I combine standard linguistic procedures with formal, corpus-based and typological methodologies. I also have some experience with experimental research on natural language.

I like basketball and zombies.