Ankana Saha

About me

I'm a 5th year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University  advised by Dr Gennaro Chierchia and Dr Kathryn Davidson. My research focuses on natural language semantics and its interfaces with pragmatics and syntax.  I use 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.

I’m 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. I explore these issues using a mix of formal theory, experimental methods, and fieldwork, with an empirical focus on South Asian languages.

I am an affiliate at the The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Before coming to Harvard, I completed my undergraduate studies in Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics at the Christ University (Bangalore, India) and my Master's degree in Linguistics at The English and Foreign Languages University (Hyderabad, India) .

Contact

ankana_saha@g.harvard.edu 

Boylston Hall, 3rd Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138