Elena Herburger

Research Interests

Language is only useful for communication because the sentences we utter, write or think have meaning. As a semanticist, I am interested in how speakers systematically, and largely unconsciously, build up the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its parts and how these are put together. I am also interested in how speakers figure out contextual aspects of meanings that go beyond what the sentences literally say. Topics that I have worked on include negation,  focus, quantification, and conditionals. Most of the data I work with are drawn from English, Spanish and German as these are languages that I speak. 

Selected Work

Book

2000. What Counts: Focus and Quantification. MIT Press.

Recent talks

On the non-monoticity of conditionals: A ceteris paribus, event-based analysis. Philosophical Linguistics and Linguistic Philosophy (PhLiP) 10,  PhLiP-handoutEH 

The relation between Negative Polarity and Negative Concord. Sinn und Bedeutung 30, Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives on Negation. SuBslidesEH 

Papers

2026. Conditionals. to appear in Handbook of Linguistic Semantics - Bridging Linguistics, Philosophy and Cognition. Springer.  ConditionalsHBEH 

2024. Additive presuppositions and logical strength (with Paul Portner). Proceedings of the 2024 Amsterdam Colloquium. online 

2024. On the history of NPIs and Negative Concord.  Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique. Published online. Special issue on historical semantics. https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2023.29

2023. From temporal to concessive meanings: a semantic analysis of 'still' (with Aynat Rubinstein). Proceedings of SALT 33. https://doi.org/10.3765/yc66yy33 

2019. Bare conditionals in the red, Linguistics and Philosophy 42:131-175 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9242-2

2019. Gradable possibility and epistemic comparison (with Aynat Rubinstein). Journal of Semantics 36, 165-191 https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/36/1/165/5162913?guestAccessKey=05db0214-68e2-44fe-b276-fd130f1dfb19 

2017. Nur Du allein: Some thoughts on sentence initial focus particles in German. Festschrift für Martin Prinzhorn. Edited by Clemens Mayr and Edwin Williams, published by Wiener Linguistische Gazette, 119-126. prepub version

2015. Conditional Perfection: The truth and the whole truth. in Proceedings of SALT 25.  https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v25i0.3079

2015. Only if: If only we understood it. Proceedings from Sinn und Bedeutung 19. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2015.v19i0.235

2014. Is 'more possible' more possible in German? with Aynat Rubinstein, Proceedings of SALT 24. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2717

2013. The chance of being an NPI. (with Simon Mauck) Beyond 'any' and 'ever'.New Reflections Polarity Sensitivity. Edited by Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingha Li  and Manfred Sailer, Berlin: Mouton DeGrutyer, 211-239. prepub version

2012. Review of Negative Indefinites by Doris Penka. Oxford University Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Language 88, 663-666. 

2012. Negation. Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Edited by Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger and Paul Portner. Handbook of Linguistics and Communication Science. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1641-1660. prepub version 

2009. NPIs pragmatically. (with Simon Mauck) Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (BLS) 35 (Negation). prepub version 

2003. A note on Spanish ni siquiera, even and the analysis of NPIs. Probus 15, 237-256

2001. The negative concord puzzle revisited. Natural Language Semantics 9, 241-288

1997. Focus and weak noun phrases. Natural Language Semantics 5, 53-78

1994.  A semantic difference between full and partial wh-movement in German. LSA paper talk as read