Louise McNally

Louise McNally (born 1965) is a linguist and professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). She researches semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces with syntax, in particular on areas including natural semantic ontology, scales, and reference.

Biography

McNally earned her PhD in linguistics at UC Santa Cruz in 1992 with a dissertation entitled, "A Semantics for the English Existential Construction," which was published in Garland's Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series in 1997 (and republished by Routledge/Taylor Francis in 2016).

She worked at Indiana University Bloomington from 1992 until 1994, and then briefly at The Ohio State University and UC San Diego, before taking up her current position at UPF in 1995.

Awards and honors

In 2017, McNally was awarded the Humboldt Prize.

In 2025, McNally was elected as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

McNally serves as co-Editor-in-Chief with Kjell Johan Sæbø of the Linguistic Society of America's open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P).

Selected publications