Principal Investigator

Kathryn Barnes is a doctoral researcher in formal semantics at Goethe University. She completed her BA in French and German Studies at the University of Warwick in 2016 and her MA in Linguistics at The University of Manchester in 2019, where her thesis was based on fieldwork on the semantics of modal verbs in Malay. Her research has since turned to iconicity, with a particular focus on ideophones, including experimentally investigating the meaning and at-issue status of ideophones crosslinguistically, as well as developing a semantic account for the phenomena. She is also interested in exploring how ideophones interact with other iconic enrichments such as gestures and understanding ideophone-like constructions in other modalities, for example classifier constructions and idiomatic signs in sign language.