Welcome to the lab!


Welcome to the Meaning and Modality (M&M) Laboratory at Harvard Linguistics! We are interested in understanding the uniquely human capacity for language, especially the ability to convey abstract, infinite, specific meanings across the multiple modalities for natural language, including but not limited to speech and sign. Our work spans the subfields of formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, language acquisition, logic and psycholinguistics in an effort to understand the relationship between linguistic meaning, language mode, language development, and human cognition.

roughly 15 members of the lab outside in the deck

(Lab meeting, October 2023)

Latest News

Lab members attend the LSA in NYC

January 21, 2024
10 linguists in front of a banner saying "welcome linguists"
The 2024 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting was held January 4-7 in New York City, and was attended by current lab members Natasha Thalluri, who presented a poster on "Morphosyntactic convergence in Dakkhini Urdu- reanalysis and lexical innovation in the pronominal paradigm", Yuhan Zhang, who presented a poster on "More linguists have been to LSA than I have: Explaining the comparative illusion from a noisy-channel perspective", Jian Cui and Jack Rabinovitch, who presented on "Two Voices Calling Out as One: A Split Voice Analysis of Javanese Passives", and Tory Sampson, as well as lab alums Shannon Bryant and Kate Henninger - so great to see everyone celebrate 100 years of linguistics at the LSA!

M&M at Sinn & Bedeutung

September 5, 2023

This year Sinn & Bedeutung (SuB 28) at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) from September 5-8, 2023, with several lab members and alums participating. Natasha Thalluri and Kathryn Davidson presented their paper "Degrees and depiction - Gradability in sign languages", Anatasia Tsilia and Kathryn Davidson presented their paper "Effects of iconicity and monocity on licensing complement anaphora", and Yağmur Sağ presented their paper "Cardinality and (in)definiteness. Our former graduate student and lab member Dorothy Ahn presented their work "Deriving (anti-)uniquness in definite expressions" as an invited speaker.

Commencement 2023

May 31, 2023
Two white women standing in a grassy area with graduation robes on (one with blonde hair/red gown, one with brown hair/blue gown)
We were excited to welcome Shannon Bryant back from her postdoc position at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) to celebrate graduation here at Harvard Yard, picture with Kate Davidson after the GSAS ceremony in Sanders Theatre. Congratulations again to all of the M&M lab members/now alums who are 2023 graduates: Shannon (PhD), Guiseppe (PhD), Mikaela (AB), and Richard (AB)! 

Harvard at SALT

May 15, 2023
11 people with conference badges looking at the camera

This year Semantics And Linguistic Theory (SALT) was held at Yale, with several lab members and alums participating. Ankana Saha, Yağmur Sağ & Kathryn Davidson presented a poster "Focus on demonstratives: Experiments in English & Turkish", Gennaro Chierchia gave an invited talk, and (alums) Becky Jarvis presented on "Movement & interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" and Johanna Alstott presented a poster on "Ordinal Numbers: Not Superlatives, but Modifiers of Superlatives", and Ankana, Yağmur and Dasha Bikina all presented posters at the workshop on "(In)definiteness and genericity across language". Pictured are the Harvard semantics crew, present and past, at SALT.

Mikaela to Penn, Richard to Yale

April 28, 2023
We are excited to celebrate the class of 2023, including two of our awesome undergraduate lab members who are both headed to PhD programs in Linguistics this fall: Mikaela Belle Martin is headed to UPenn Linguistics and Richard Luo is headed to Yale Linguistics. We've been so lucky to work with both of you and can't wait to see where your linguistics research takes you!

Harvard at HSP

March 1, 2023
Several lab folks and affiliates are presenting at the Human Sentence Processing conference next week at the University of Pittsburgh, including Yuhan Zhang with one poster on pronoun gender bias and another on the interpretation of logical connectives crosslinguistically, Dasha Bikina on pragmatics of bare nouns in Russian, Hao Lin on word order and age of acquistion in CSL, and Anthony Yacavone on form-based lexical prediction in children. 

Ankana, Yuhan, and Natasha at SNEWS

November 12, 2022
Several members of the lab presented at the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) at Yale: Ankana Saha presented on "The puzzle of kind reference in Bangla", Yuhan Zhang presented on "The puzzle of de re acceptability for definite noun phrases", and Natasha Thalluri presented on "Effects of information structure on word order in Hindi".

BUCLD and Friendsgiving

November 11, 2022
Colorful November in New England has been busy: at the annual Boston University Conference on Language Development we had a great volunteer turnout by lab folks (Hande, Hao, Yuhan, Mikaela, and Irene) and a poster on children's acquisition of negative polarity items with colleagues at Brown ("Negative polarity or negative concord? Some children think ’any’ means ’no’."), and the following week we had a lab Thanksgiving at Kate's place. Happy fall!
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