Yichi (Raven) Zhang

Greetings! I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Linguistics at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. I received my Ph.D. degree in the department of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2022. My main interests lie in semantics & pragmatics, logic, philosophy of language.

My main research project consists in exploring formal frameworks for analyzing information exchange. In my dissertation, I aim to extend the existing inquisitive semantics in various ways. In particular, I devise a new conception of information exchange that incorporates a notion of salient possibilities. This enriched conception of information exchange sheds new light on other issues such as conditionals, epistemic modals, and information oddness.

More recently, I have been investigating ways to provide a uniform analysis for declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. This calls for a rethinking of logical operators, such as disjunction and negation, as they can take non-propositional content (e.g., speech act content) as their arguments.

Work in Progress

A paper on the logic for denegation and non-persistent operators.

A paper on defining indicative conditionals with probabilistic negation in team semantics.

Papers

Zhang, Y. R. (forthcoming). Imperative-or-declarative and practical triviality. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung.

Zhang, Y. R. (forthcoming). On speech act disjunction. In Semantics and Linguistic Theory.

Zhang, Y. R. (2025). QUD-mediated redundancy. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (Vol. 29, pp. 1784-1801).

Zhang, Y. R. (2024). Discourse consistency and dynamic modals in commitment space semantics. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (Vol. 28, pp. 1060-1078).

Zhang, Y. (2023). On the modeling of live possibilities. In Semantics and Linguistic Theory (pp. 686-706).

Zhang, Y. R., & Pacuit, E. (2022, December). Epistemic pseudo-agreement and hyper-domain semantics for epistemic modals. In 23 rd Amsterdam Colloquium (p. 327).

Zhang, Y., & Onyper, S. (2020). Visual search asymmetry depends on target-distractor feature similarity: Is the asymmetry simply a result of distractor rejection speed?. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(1), 80-97.

Contact

You can reach me at yichi.zhang@hhu.de