Personal information
Biography
Dr. Adina Camelia Bleotu currently teaches linguistics at the University of Bucharest. Additionally, she is the Principal Investigator of an UEFISCDI-funded project on "The Acquisition of Disjunction". Recently, during October 2021- March 2022, she was a fellow in the Research area 4 'Semantics & Pragmatics', and between April-October 2022, she was a researcher in the project "Experimental Game Theory and Scalar Implicatures. Investigating variation in context and scale type (SIGames 2)" / Research area 4 'Semantics & Pragmatics'.
Adina Camelia Bleotu has a PhD on theoretical linguistics (in particular, on denominal verbs) from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Alessandra Giorgi. In her PhD thesis-which was published as a monograph at Brill in 2019, she compare various theoretical approaches to the analysis of denominal verbs (lexical syntax, distributed morphology, spanning), embracing a spanning account as the best representation. While her thesis was theoretical, in the past 6 years, she has been been fully immersed into the world of experimental cognitive and generative linguistics, conducting experiments on a variety of topics, focusing mainly on language acquisition research.
She has investigated denominal verbs in language acquisition during a postdoc on denominals and creativity at the University of Bucharest.
Together with Anton Benz (ZAS Berlin) and Nicole Gotzner (Potsdam), she has also investigated various types of embedded implicatures, in an effort to understand the semantic and pragmatic differences between quantifiers and modal items in adult and child Romanian. She has also looked at the interaction between necessity modality and negation in English and Romanian and at indirect inferences with several modal adverbs in Romanian by means of the Shadow Play Paradigm.
Another topic of great interest to her is recursion (of prepositional phrases, adjectives and relative clauses), a topic she has been exploring extensively in child language in collaboration with Tom Roeper (UMass Amherst) and Deborah Foucault (UMass Amherst) since 2018.
As part of a Fulbright Grant at UMass Amherst in 2020, I have conducted psycholinguistic experiments on agreement attraction on adults (Romanian natives) together with Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst).