Mathieu Paillé

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics and Banting fellow at ZAS. I specialize in semantics and pragmatics.

Most of my work focuses on exhaustification, predicate meanings, and the relation between language and thought. I’m interested in using the tools of formal semantics to learn more about how language interacts with other aspects of cognition. For example, I have argued that in most sentences, there is a mismatch between the intuited meaning of predicates like nouns and adjectives, and their underlying conceptual representations.

Previously, I was at the University of Calgary as a postdoctoral researcher, and at McGill as a Vanier scholar, where I defended my thesis in 2022.

In my spare time I enjoy studying languages, social movement organising, and time outdoors. I’m a native French speaker from a minority community in Winnipeg, Canada.

Get in touch! mathieu.paille (at) mail.mcgill.ca.

selected publications

L&P

An interaction between logical vocabulary and predicate meanings

Paillé, Mathieu

Linguistics and Philosophy 2025

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Predicates within many conceptual classes are intuited as mutually exclusive. Based on these predicates’ interaction with logical vocabulary like and or also, however, this paper argues that they are in fact underlyingly consistent; the strong intuited meanings arise from semantic exhaustification. In addition to demonstrating that exhaustification is more widespread than previously believed, this paper also shows that this particular exhaustification effect behaves in a hitherto undescribed manner. Indeed, a predicate’s exhaustification is always computed locally at the level of the predicate, rather than the clause or sentence containing it.
Glossa

Beyond thematic uniqueness

Paillé, Mathieu

Glossa 2025

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A common way of characterising the relationship between events and their participants is to postulate that the latter are assigned thematic roles. This is subject to a ‘thematic uniqueness’ constraint: an event cannot have more than one participant bearing the same thematic role. Building on recent work on predicates of individuals, this article demonstrates that thematic uniqueness is part of a broader phenomenon, which I call ‘predicational uniqueness.’ I model predicational uniqueness as stemming from predicational exhaustification; on this view, all predicates, whether they are thematic predicates of events or non-thematic predicates of individuals, are locally strengthened vis-à-vis alternative predicates from the same conceptual or thematic class.
JoS

Co-predications and the quantificational force of summative predicates

Paillé, Mathieu

Journal of Semantics 2024

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In the literature on homogeneity, summative predicates have been described as quantifying universally over their argument’s parts in positive sentences, while being negated existentials in negative sentences. In this article, I provide a fuller picture of these predicates’ quantificational force in positive sentences through various ’co-predications’—sentences in which two summative predicates are predicated of the same individual. In some co-predications, summative predicates are universal; in others, they are weaker, while remaining stronger than existential. In light of this new empirical paradigm, I suggest that summative predicates are lexically existential, but are exhaustified so as to exclude other same-class predicates. In addition to making this proposal, I also show that no other theory of homogeneity can capture the co-predicational paradigm.