Fausto Carcassi

Fausto Carcassi is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, and affiliated with the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation (ILLC). His work integrates computational and experimental approaches to semantics and pragmatics, focusing on language as a cognitive phenomenon at the intersection of linguistics and cognitive science.

He earned his PhD in 2020 from the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh under Simon Kirby and Marieke Schouwstra, investigating evolutionary mechanisms behind cross-linguistic universals in scalar semantics (monotonicity and extremeness). Subsequent positions include a postdoctoral fellowship at the ILLC with Jakub Szymanik on Bayesian/evolutionary approaches to quantifier semantics, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship at the University of Tübingen with Michael Franke studying plausible deniability.

His research centers on cognitive foundations of language, examining how humans infer communicative intent, typological constraints on meaning, and concept encoding/learning. Methodologically, he combines Bayesian cognitive modeling, evolutionary simulations, and experimental techniques to explore scalar language phenomena, quantification, conceptual spaces, and language evolution.

Dr. Carcassi holds the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, reflecting his competitive research profile. His grant-funded work supports computational and experimental investigations into semantic-pragmatic interfaces.

As part of the Language & Music Cognition (LMC) research group at the ILLC, he contributes to interdisciplinary collaborations on cognitive and computational aspects of linguistic and musical cognition, though specific team structures remain unelaborated in source materials.