ALUMNA INTERVIEW: LOUISE MCNALLY

Louise McNally earned the PhD from UCSC in 1992 with a dissertation that has become one of the foundational documents in the literature on existential constructions (An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction). Since 1995, she has been a faculty member at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and she has had a central role in developing the language sciences community in Catalonia. Louise was recently recognized (for the second time) with a research professorship from ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudio Avançats), so we thought that this would be a good time to check in with her.

WHASC: First, many congratulations on your recent ICREA Research Professorship (your second). Could you tell us a little about what this award means for you and what opportunities it opens (for you and for your group)?

Louise: The ICREA award gives me a 50% teaching buyout for 5 years, plus some additional research money. The money comes with very few strings attached, so I’ve used it for various things, mainly as extra support for my students. The best thing about the grant, besides the extra research time, is the flexibility these funds offer.

WHASC: What are you working on at present?

Louise: I’m starting a new project that’s called ‘CONNECT: Connecting conceptual and referential models of meaning’. The title sums it up pretty clearly, and the problem the project addresses is one that has come up repeatedly in different strands of my work. On the one hand, a recurring theme for me since my dissertation has been what you might call the interplay of type- and token-level expressions in language. On the other, I’ve spent most of the last 10 years trying to figure out how to deal with the context dependence of the interpretation of modifiers. A few years ago, since I felt like I couldn’t get much further with classical formal models of modification, I started collaborating with researchers working on distributional semantic models of meaning. Distributional representations do very well at resolving many sorts of context-dependence, and they turn out to offer quite interesting (if imperfect) models of type-level contents as well. On the other hand, distributional models in their current form do not look very promising as models of reference or information structure—things that frameworks like DRT handle well. So the idea is to work on integrating the two sorts of models.

WHASC: You’ve been centrally involved in developing the research and teaching community in linguistics in Barcelona. How does that look at present? What kind of work is being done and what is the community like? What does the future hold?

Louise: Things are great. We’ve got a critical mass of strong doctoral students and have been very lucky to have a steady stream of excellent postdocs and visiting researchers. Our Master’s program, which we started to offer in English a few years ago, is attracting lots of students from all over. I hope we can consolidate the quality we have, continue to strengthen our ties with some other programs both in Spain and in Europe, and just keep on doing new and interesting things. The people in our group are doing all kinds of things. To give just a sample: the clause structure of Catalan Sign Language, the evolution of the auxiliary system in Spanish and Catalan, nominalization of verbs and adjectives in various languages, lexical aspect in Japanese, the syntax of long-distance dependencies, different expressions of denial and the insights they offer into pragmatic theory, and the interaction of prosody and gesture.

WHASC: That all sounds really exciting. However, building that community has involved a lot of heavy administrative work on your part, yet you have remained very active in research. How is that possible? How do you meet both kinds of demands on your time?

Louise: There’s no secret: First, I have a lot of administrative support. Second, I work a lot of hours, try to maximize efficiency, and try to lose sleep over nothing. It’s amazing how much you can improve your efficiency in research by simply learning how to calculate the approximate time it takes to do a given research-related task and scheduling those tasks into your day.

WHASC: What’s it like in Barcelona?

Louise: In some ways it’s like a big, European-flavored Santa Cruz. Every time I go running along the beach here, I remember running along West Cliff Drive. Barcelona is an ideal city for anyone interested in language, especially multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and language policy. An easy way to see for yourself is to come to ESSLLI at UPF next August (a few preliminary details are already available on the web), or to spend some time as a visitor.

WHASC: Looking back at your own time in Santa Cruz, have you any advice for current students looking to build a career like yours?

Louise: I think the most important things I learned at Santa Cruz were humility and how to dig deeper into whatever issue was under discussion. I also remember and find occasion to repeat regularly many pearls of wisdom from my professors. I’ll mention just one: ‘Ideas are cheap; it’s working out the details that has merit.’ (Your collective homework is to figure out who said that; hint: it’s someone who’s still on the faculty.) A few other pieces of advice:

• In any situation you find yourself, know what you can change and what you cannot change, and work to maximize your strengths and those of your environment.
• Never hesitate to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, even if their immediate payoff is not obvious.
• Do not underestimate the social dimension of research activity.

WHASC: Thanks a lot, Louise, and good luck with everything.