Meertens, E. (Erlinde)

Erlinde Meertens (1991) is a postdoctoral researcher in animal linguistics at the Meertens Institute. She studied linguistics at Utrecht University. In 2021, she obtained her PhD from the University of Konstanz with a thesis on the intersections between semantics, pragmatics, syntax and phonology in the composition of interrogative sentences. Her research focuses on the interaction between humans and animals and the pragmatic mechanisms underlying it. At the Meertens Institute, she is involved in the cow language research project. Previously, she worked on ‘Questions at the Interfaces’ at the University of Konstanz, which looked at the composition of questions from different linguistic perspectives. Before joining the Meertens Institute, she worked as a software engineer, data linguist and teacher in secondary education.

Key publications

• Meertens, E. (2020). How prosody disambiguates between Alternative and Polar Questions. In J. J. Schlöder, D McHugh and F. Roelofsen, eds., Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, pages 299-308.
• Meertens, E., Egger, S., & Romero, M. (2019). Multiple accent in alternative questions. In M.T. Espinal, E. Castroviejo, M. Leonetti, L. McNally and C. Real-Puigdollers , eds., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, vol.2, pages 179-195.