Laia Mayol

Laia Mayol is an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain. She teaches undergraduate and master's level courses in linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, and English grammar. Her academic journey includes postdoctoral research at UPF through the 'Juan de la Cierva' program and at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), following the completion of her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.

Professor Mayol's research focuses on pragmatics and semantics, both theoretical and experimental. Her work particularly centers on information structure and discourse structure, examining how meaning is constructed beyond truth-conditional content. She investigates the interpretation and production of anaphoric forms across languages, with special attention to Romance languages like Catalan and Spanish. Her approach combines formal linguistic theory with empirical methodology, reflecting the growing integration of theoretical and experimental paradigms in contemporary linguistics.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a consistent focus on the syntax-pragmatics interface, particularly how information structure (especially focus) interacts with syntactic realization in Romance languages. Her work spans theoretical syntax, experimental pragmatics, and cross-linguistic comparison, demonstrating methodological diversity while maintaining thematic coherence. A significant portion of her research examines Catalan specifically, contributing to our understanding of this understudied Romance language, while also situating Catalan findings within broader Romance and theoretical linguistic frameworks.

Professor Mayol is actively involved in research projects, currently working on the EXPEDIS project funded by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (grant number PID2021-122779NB-I00) and the European Regional Development Fund. She is a member of the consolidated research group Grup de Lingüística Formal (GLIF) and the Unitat de Recerca en Lingüística (UR-LING), which provide collaborative frameworks for her linguistic investigations.