About me
I am a postdoc in semantics and pragmatics at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin.
You can find my academic CV here. My last name is pronounced [hɑ:sliŋɐ].
My current position at ZAS is partially funded by the ERC project “Realizing Leibniz's Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind” (PIs: Artemis Alexiadou, Maria Teresa Guasti and Uli Sauerland).
I defended my PhD thesis “Pragmatic constraints on imprecision and homogeneity”, supervised by Clemens Steiner-Mayr, Viola Schmitt and Daniel Büring, at the University of Göttingen in 2024. I received my MA in General Linguistics in 2019 from the University of Vienna, where I was also employed within the project “Conjunction and Disjunction from a Typological Perspective” (PI: Viola Schmitt).
I was born in Vienna in 1992. As an undergraduate, I studied computer science and German literature in Vienna for several years before discovering linguistics.
News
- This fall, Keny Chatain and I are organizing the third edition of the workshop series Gaps and Imprecision in Natural Language Semantics at ZAS in Berlin.
- From mid-October until the end of the spring semester in 2025, I will be a postdoctoral associate at MIT (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy).
Research interests
My work aims to improve our understanding of the logical primitives and the semantic composition mechanisms of natural languages within a broadly generative framework. Methodologically, I am interested in how experimental research, morphosyntactic typology and language acquisition research can help us decide between theoretical options in semantics and pragmatics. While much of my work has focused on German and English, I also have a strong interest in cross-linguistic semantics.
Linguistic phenomena I have worked on include plural predication (particularly cumulativity and non-maximality), nominal universal quantifiers, propositional attitudes and other kinds of intensional complements, grammaticalized implicatures/exhaustification and gradable predicates.
Here are some of the big-picture questions I am currently interested in:
- Semantic effects of implicit questions under discussion are pervasive in natural language. How does this QUD-dependence come about in semantic composition, and how does it differ from other forms of context-dependent interpretation such as domain restriction or comparison-class dependence?
- Recent work in plural semantics has focused on properties of natural language quantifiers and connectives that are not captured by classical predicate logic or traditional generalized quantifier theory, e.g. homogeneity effects and non-distributivity. What are the consequences of these findings for research in pragmatics and language acquisition that relies on classical meanings for the quantifiers and connectives?
- To what extent are “cartographic” generalizations about the size of the syntactic structures associated with particular meanings predictable in semantic/pragmatic terms?
My PhD project investigates the formal pragmatics of imprecision, a form of semantic context-dependency driven by implicit questions. Imprecise expressions include definite plurals like the books (as opposed to all the books) and “round” degree expressions such as 20 (as opposed to 21). I argue that the availability of imprecise interpretations for a given expression is constrained by its alternative set, relying on assumptions about scalar and structural alternatives that are familiar from work on implicatures. Further, I claim that due to these alternative-based constraints, imprecise expressions are systematically associated with less complex syntactic structures than their precise counterparts, and that the interaction between these constraints indirectly supports a modular view of the semantics/pragmatics interface.
Contact information
- haslinger {at} leibniz-zas {dot} de or ninamhaslinger {at} gmail {dot} com
Please note that my University of Göttingen address has been deactivated and I cannot use it anymore. - Work address
- Nina Haslinger
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Pariser Straße 1 (Raum 1.14)
10719 Berlin, Germany