Thomas Stephen

Thomas Stephen

Fellow (Semantics) at Trinity College Dublin. Working on formal semantics, the syntax–semantics interface, and philosophy of language.

Thomas Stephen

I am a Fellow in Semantics at the School of Linguistic, Speech, and Communication Sciences, Trinity College Dublin.

My research centres on formal semantics, with particular attention to the syntax–semantics interface and its connections to the philosophy of language. I am especially interested in the semantics of clausal and nominal embedding — how verbs, nouns, and predicates take sentences or questions as their complements, and what this reveals about the structure of propositional content.

Current projects include:

  • DACE (Dictionary of Alternations in Clause Embedding): an online resource documenting clause-embedding predicates in English
  • Mechanistic interpretation of large language models and what it reveals about semantic representations
  • The evolution of compositionality in natural language (in collaboration with Fausto Carcassi)

I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2023, where my dissertation — The Semantics of Nominal and Clausal Embedding — was supervised by Robert Truswell, Bryan Pickel, and Wataru Uegaki. Before joining TCD, I was Lecturer in Linguistics (Semantics) at Queen Mary University of London.

I enjoy walking up tall hills.

Email: tmurrays@tcd.ie