Mengyang Qiu

I work in pragmatics, the study of how meaning is communicated and understood in natural language use. My broader research interest lies in developing cognitively grounded accounts of communication that go beyond strictly propositional content, with particular attention to affect and other non-propositional aspects of communication.

My PhD thesis proposed a ‘dual-route’ model to examine the role of mental imagery in guiding the process of poetic metaphors, focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that allow non-conceptual representations to feed back into pragmatic processing. This work established my long-standing interest in the limits of propositionality and in the role of relevance-driven inference.

Building on this, my current research focuses on the interface between pragmatics and affective science. I am currently part of a Leverhulme Research Project, 'Searching for relevance’, one that seeks to integrate insights from relevance-theoretic pragmatics and appraisal-based approaches in affective science.