Welcome to the MAL Lab!

The Meaning Across Languages lab explores how meaning is encoded and used across languages. How are meanings expressed across languages, and how/where do we look for them when the languages have different words, sentence structures, and pragmatic expectations? What do the similarities and differences tell us about the basic building blocks of meaning that are made available by human cognition?

The projects in our lab involve discussion of formal semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and syntax and makes use of quantitative methods to investigate the relationship between language meaning, use, and cognition.

Our lab’s logo was created by Gérard Avelino, a graduate student in our lab. The logo spells the Korean word 말 ([maːl/]) in Hangul, which sounds like ‘mal’. 말 lacks an exact translation in English, but can be used to mean “language, word, utterance” etc. depending on context. For example, woori mal (‘our mal’) is translated as ‘our language’ (referring to Korean), while mal used in saying ‘That’s not a mal’ denotes something like an utterance or a sentence. I like the flexibility of this word because to me it represents what linguistics is: it’s about language, but it’s also about utterance, about word use, etc.

Of course in Latin mal means ‘bad’ or ‘evil’, hence the purple, horned smiley next to the name 😈. But this word can remind us that a word can mean so many different things across languages.