Ankana Saha

Ankana is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics studying natural language semantics. She uses tools of formal mathematics and logic to study how utterances come to have the meanings they do, and how meaning interacts with linguistic structure and discourse contexts. She is particularly interested in investigating issues pertaining to the nominal domain like the semantics of bare nouns in languages with and without determiners, kind reference, number marking, definiteness, demonstratives, anaphora, and the cross-linguistic variability in the expression of epistemic indefinites. She explores these issues using a mix of formal theory, experimental methods, and fieldwork, with an empirical focus on South Asian languages. In her current collaborative project, she uses experimental and quantitative methodology to investigate the behavior of definite descriptions and demonstrative expressions in anaphoric contexts in order to understand the core building blocks of definiteness in Language.