XINXIN YAN

I'm a final year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at University College London. 

​

I am broadly interested in meaning, especially regarding the mental, cognitive process of how a speaker intended meaning is inferentially derived. My current research project focuses on investigating how we interpret figurative language, such as metaphors and similes.  For my doctorate thesis, I aim to build up a theoretical pragmatics account to model the process of simile understanding under the relevance-theoretic framework, which, in my opinion, is expected to be different from both the processing of metaphor and of literal comparison.  

​

When not doing academic work, I usually spend my time in reading books of philosophy and classic literature, making podcasts (I host two podcasts on ximalaya.com talking about English poetry and The Analects), learning new languages (currently, 日本語), dancing and playing badminton!