Diti Bhadra
University of Minnesota, MN·Social Science·Early-career
Small words in conversation often carry a lot of meaning. Words like "surely" or "after all" can signal what a speaker believes, what they assume the listener knows, or how sure they are.
- Fields
Social Science
Psychology
- Topics
linguistics
semantics
pragmatics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Analyze how modal discourse particles, small words signaling possibility, necessity or evidence, combine with the clauses they attach to, using fieldwork with speakers of four understudied languages.
- Examine how discourse particles interact with tense, aspect and mood in these languages to uncover universal patterns in how meaning and context work together.
- Investigate discourse particles in non-canonical speech acts, utterances beyond plain statements, questions and commands, and build open-source materials for theory-driven semantic fieldwork in any language.
More about the research
Linguists call these words discourse particles. This project uses them to study how two systems work together: semantics, the logical reasoning built into language meaning, and pragmatics, how conversational context shapes interpretation. It does this through fieldwork on four diverse, understudied languages, looking for patterns that hold across all human languages.
Why it matters
This basic research adds to our understanding of how human languages express reasoning, belief and knowledge in conversation, drawing on understudied languages that theories often overlook. Its open-source fieldwork materials could help researchers document the meaning systems of any language, including less-studied ones.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elena Koulidobrova
Central Connecticut State University, CT·Social Science
Build treebanks, collections of sentences annotated for grammatical structure in the Universal Dependencies format, that capture how evidential markers (grammatical signals of information source) and focus features appear in sentences.
Naomi Shin
University of New Mexico, NM·Social Science
Test whether the listener's location affects a speaker's choice of demonstratives ('this/that'), predicting stronger effects in languages with more demonstrative terms, through experiments that vary where the listener is.
Jonathan Amith
Gettysburg College, PA·Computer Science
Build POWSM, a foundation speech model that transcribes any language as sequences of consonants and vowels, and prompt it with vector representations of sound correspondences so it can recognize low-resource varieties as transformed versions of well-resourced ones.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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