Elin McCready - Biography#
Elin McCready received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Osaka University and then took a position at Aoyama Gakuin University in 2006, where she became Professor in 2015. She is an ICREA Research Professor at the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona as of 2025.
McCready’s work centers around language, in particular around questions of meaning in semantics and pragmatics. She has worked on a broad range of topics in these domains and in philosophy of language. In the past few years, her research has focused on three main questions: the semantics and pragmatics of social meanings, especially in political speech; the application of semantic and pragmatic tools to art and literature; and embodiment and anthropocentrism in language. She is currently engaged in extensions of these projects and in the modeling of embodiment in language.
McCready has published on many topics in semantics and pragmatics, including evidentiality, conditionals, discourse particles, expressive content, reliability and trust, and modality. In recent years, she has worked on a number of topics related to `social meaning’: the interaction of linguistic meaning and social facts. She has done influential work on slurs, honorifics, and dogwhistles, among other topics, and continues to work on these areas and others; her current work on social meaning involves slurs, linguistic items involving stereotypical and normative content, and the interaction between testimonial trust, social position, and nonasserted content.
Most recently, McCready has been exploring extensions of linguistic theory to other domains. She has published on applications of mathematical models in semantic and pragmatic theory to artistic practice, specifically the creation of experimental literary texts and conceptual art within interpretative spaces. This work is entirely novel and has garnered some attention within artistic and literary worlds. She has also considered how embodiment and its expression within language and linguistic interpretation play into the possibility of cross-species communication and understanding, in the context of the environmental humanities and xenolinguistics. Her current research aims to bring results from this interdisciplinary work back to linguistics proper and employ it in the analysis of empirical linguistic phenomena, including derogatory speech, metaphor, evidentials, and acquaintance-based predicates.
McCready is a prolific author, with 4 academic books, 10 (co-)edited volumes, 60 journal articles/book chapters, and 39 conference proceedings, the majority in highly prestigious venues. She has been the PI of two projects funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in addition to having earned a number of institutional small research grants. She has (co-)supervised 5 PhD theses; her supervisees have gone on to permanent academic positions in Japan and Germany.
