About me
I am a linguist interested in formal semantics and pragmatics and particularly in the interface between pragmatic constraints and morphosyntactic structure. I am currently a postdoc in Research Area 4 (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 (25%) 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.
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. It starts from the assumption that very basic properties of the semantic/pragmatic contribution and internal composition of items like quantifiers, connectives or determiners still remain to be understood, and that the same holds for the structure inherent in what seem to be simple lexical predicates.
I believe that syntactic decomposition below the word level, motivated by cross-linguistic patterns, will be crucial to this endeavour. Therefore, although much of my work has focused on German and English, I also have a strong interest in typology and cross-linguistic semantics. My aim is to contribute to current developments in the field that will allow semantic/pragmatic reasoning and morphosyntactic typology to inform each other more systematically.
More recently, I have also developed a strong interest in formal pragmatics, specifically in the role of syntactic structure in theories of strengthening based on alternatives, and in the conditions under which a sentence can be acceptable despite being truth-conditionally redundant.
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, pragmatic oddness effects such as Hurford sentences, and gradable predicates.
A common theme of my work on these different phenomena has been effects of implicit questions under discussion, context-dependent notions of individuation and difference, and similar contextual parameters. I have come to believe that such effects are pervasive in natural language, but subject to systematic constraints across languages and different areas of grammar. My PhD project aims to study some of these constraints by investigating 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 depends 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 I do not have access to my MIT or University of Göttingen email accounts anymore. - Work address
- Nina Haslinger
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Pariser Straße 1 (Raum 1.45)
10719 Berlin