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.

Papers

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