TABU Dag 2026 - Groningen

Merijn Benning

Role: PhD student member (Chair)
Interests: Sociolinguistics, Multilingualism, Migration Studies
About: Merijn researches the sociolinguistic dimension of caregiving in Latin-American migrant communities in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He's interested in qualitative and inductive methodologies such as Grounded Theory and Social Network Mapping.

Yizhuo Zhang

Role: PhD student member (Secretary)
Interests: Semantic and Pragmatic Inferencing, indexicality
About: Yizhuo is a first-year PhD student in the research group of Semantics and Cognition and language diversity. Her project investigates the meaning of address forms across languages, focusing on indexical interpretation and the inferential mechanisms guiding their use in context.

Elisa Gottardi

Role: PhD student member (Finances)
Interests: Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Language Disorders
About: Elisa is a second-year PhD candidate with IDEALAB, a joint degree programme with mobility between the University of Groningen and the University of Potsdam. Her research focuses on language impairments in children with posterior fossa tumors.

Francesca Padovani

Role: PhD student member (Website)
Interests: Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology, Language Acquisition
About: Francesca uses computational models and child–caregiver conversation transcripts to investigate acquisition hypotheses that are difficult to test in human learners and to improve the training efficiency of language models.

Alison Henehan

Role: PhD student member (Communication)
Interests: Multilingual education, teacher education
About: Alison is an interdisciplinary joint PhD student between Applied Linguistics and Teacher Education at the RUG and Macquarie University in Australia. Her research focuses on student teachers’ multilingual identities and attitudes towards multilingualism using art and AI.

Mahdi Mowlaei

Role: PhD student member (Communications)
Interests: Linguistic Anthropology, Digital Discourse, Subjectivity
About: Mahdi is a first-year PhD student and his project looks into digital discourses around migration and the semiotic repertoire of knowledge migrants. His research revolves around subjectivities and lived experiences of migrants in relation to language and other semiotic resources.

Marjolein Talsma

Role: CLCG coordinator
Interests: Theoretical Syntax and Argument Structure
About: Marjolein is the coordinator of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG). She is a theoretical syntactician and she finished her PhD a few months ago. Her research focuses on argument structure (theta-theory) within the Minimalist Program.

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