Emar Maier

Emar Maier serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, where he leads research at the intersection of formal semantics and philosophy of language. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he held a visiting position as maître de conférences invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, delivering a lecture series on Discourse Representation Theory applications.

His academic foundation includes a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen (2006), with doctoral research focused on de re and de se attitude ascriptions. Prior to his current appointment, he completed postdoctoral research in Linguistics at Nijmegen and Philosophy at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) in Amsterdam.

Maier's research program centers on foundational debates in semantics, specializing in presupposition theory, indexicality, quotation mechanisms, and attitude reports. He champions a psychologistic interpretation of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) that models real-time interpretation processes, drawing connections to Recanati's Mental Files paradigm and challenging Stalnakerian common ground frameworks. His work bridges formal linguistic theory with empirical investigations across diverse linguistic contexts.

• ERC Starting Grant for research on the continuum between direct and indirect reported speech
• Project integrates formal semantics with empirical studies of child language acquisition, sign languages, and ancient Greek corpora

As Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project, Maier directs cross-disciplinary research examining reported speech phenomena through multiple empirical lenses. His collaborative network includes the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and the Mercator Research Group at Ruhr University Bochum, where he explores philosophical dimensions of linguistic self-reference and meaning construction.