Adèle Hénot-Mortier

Profile

My theoretical research focuses on pragmatics, with particular attention to oddness and scalar implicatures. My computational work examines how language models handle challenging linguistic phenomena, ranging from morphology and syntax to semantics and pragmatics. 

My recent projects include: 

• oddness phenomena in disjunctions (“or”) and conditionals (“if”); 

• interaction between the above point and the possibility of “local” scalar implicatures (silent inferences of the form “some”~>”not all”); 

• oddness-repairing effect of only, but, at least; 

• experimental investigation of the first two points, on the “human” side and the “machine” side (with LLMs). 

In the past, I have also worked at the syntax-semantics interface, with projects on: 

• adjective-infinitive (“tough”/”pretty”) constructions in English and French; 

• constraints on pronoun combinations in special comitative constructions in French; 

• the computational representation of surface-similar morphological processes in English and Hebrew. 

Postgraduate Teaching

• Foundations of Computational Linguistics (PG); 

• Language and Artificial Intelligence (PG); 

• Syntax (PG). 

Research

Research Interests:

• pragmatic oddness; 

• the Question under Discussion framework; 

• scalar implicatures; 

• discourse particles; 

• experimental pragmatics (in particular re:implicatures); 

• contextual embeddings for morphology and predicate meaning; 

• LLMs and pragmatics; 

• Bayesian approaches to meaning. 

Publications

Selected Publications: 

• Hénot-Mortier, Adèle (2025). "One tool to rule them all"? An integrated model of the QuD for Hurford Sentences. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 29, 655-673. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2024.v29.1236
• Hénot-Mortier, Adèle (2025). Shallowly accurate but deeply confused - how language models deal with antonyms. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 28, 1079-1097. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2024.v28.1183
• Hénot-Mortier, Adèle (2024). Highs and lows of the French diminutive suffix -et(te), in "Lingue e linguaggio, Rivista semestrale" 2/2024, pp. 245-266, doi:10.1418/115294
• Égré, Paul, Benjamin Spector, Adèle Hénot-Mortier & Steven Verheye (2023). On the optimality of vagueness: "around", "between" and the Gricean maxims. Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (5):1075-1130.
• Hénot-Mortier, Adèle (2023). Do language Models discriminate between relatives and pseudorelatives?. In proceedings of the 2023 CLASP Conference on Learning with Small Data (LSD), pages 55-61, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics. 
• Benbaji-Elhadad, Ido, Omri Doron & Adèle Hénot-Mortier (2023). Distinguishing levels of morphological derivation in word-embedding models. In: Suet-Ying Lam and Satoru Ozaki (eds.), NELS 53: Proceedings of the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Vol. 1, 63-76. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
• Hénot-Mortier, Adèle (2023). Alternatives are blind to some not all kinds of context: the view from Hurford Disjunctions. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 27, 291-308. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2023.v27.1071

In Progress:

• Complementarity over competition in grammatical exhaustification, to appear in the Proceedings of SALT35. 
• Covert operators are picked to minimize QuD-ambiguity: the view from pex and only, to appear in the Proceedings of SuB30.
• With Steven Verheyen, Paul Égré and Benjamin Spector. How Vague Meanings Shape Interpretation: Evidence from Approximators. Submitted.