9458319June 26, 1994 Iatridou This award provides support to Dr. Sabine Iatridou under the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Awards program. The objective of this program is to recognize outstanding young faculty in science and engineering, to enhance the academic career of recent PhD recipients by providing flexible support for research and educational activities, and to foster contact and cooperation between academia, industry, and institutions that support research and education. Dr. Iatridou has already made significant research contributions to the field of linguistics, and she has the potential to become a leader in academic research and education. This award will allow the investigator to build on her existing research on the convergence of linguistic inquiry, philosophy, and cognition. Her main area of interest is in the relation between meaning and form in natural language. During the next few years she will undertake a cross-linguistic study of counterfactual conditionals. This is a topic at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, relating linguistic structure to cognition and language use. The research is of great importance to linguistic theory because it promises to overcome a major longstanding problem in the field: current syntactic analyses are too superficial to support a realistic representation of the semantics of human utterances, while current semantic analyses are so abstract that they give little indication of how to constrain linguistic representations. The work promises to be the touchstone for future work in this area.
