About

Diti Bhadra is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota, and a member of the graduate faculty in the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the same institution. She is a formal semanticist and fieldworker with interdisciplinary interests spanning pragmatics, typology, syntax, and cognitive science. Her primary research focus is on understanding how humans compute complexity in meaning and structure through formal mathematical and logical tools. She aims to develop rigorous theoretical models that accommodate empirical diversity, particularly at the intersection of formal semantics and typology. Her research topics include modality (epistemic and deontic), evidentiality, various types of questions and question particles, discourse particles, lexical semantics of verbs and verb roots, morpho-semantics, embedding and complementation, disjunction, and negative polarity items. A central question in her work is what can be learned about underlying universals in human linguistic systems by combining semantics with rich typological data. Bhadra's empirical work primarily focuses on South Asian languages, especially indigenous, endangered, and underresourced languages in the South Asian linguistic area. She conducts semantic fieldwork both on site and through virtual native speaker interviews and surveys. Since Fall 2022, she has been engaged in field studies in Meghalaya, northern Bengal, and other regions, investigating modality and complementation in languages such as Khasi, Ao, Adi, Lepcha, Meiteilon, Assamese, and Nepali, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). She collaborates with indigenous communities in West Bengal, including the Munda, Mahali, Kol/Ho, Santhali, Koda, and Toto languages, which are endangered and require revitalization efforts. Her recent NSF CAREER grant supports her research project titled "Theory, Fieldwork, and Typology: A Semantic/Pragmatic Triad in Underrepresented Linguistic Systems." She also leads the Fieldwork Integrates Theory & Typology (FITT) lab at the University of Minnesota, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to her linguistic research, Bhadra is interested in misinformation and disinformation research, exploring how digitized information interacts with linguistic processing, meaning computation online, and belief systems. She has received a Grant-in-Aid from the University of Minnesota's Office of the Vice President for Research for a collaborative project investigating the linguistic properties of clickbait. Bhadra earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics with a Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University in 2017 and was a Lecturer at Harvard University's Department of Linguistics in 2018 and 2019. She recently received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Programming language
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Force shift: a case study of Cantonese ho2 particle clusters

  Natural Language Semantics · 2024-02-05 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Verb roots encode outcomes: argument structure and lexical semantics of reversal and restitution

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2024-07-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Evidentiality: Unifying Nominal and Propositional Domains

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  In the vast literature on evidentiality, empirical and theoretical focus has mostly been on propositional evidentiality, i.e. evidentials that scope over propositions. In this work, we undertake a crosslinguistic comparative study of propositional and nominal evidentiality, i.e. evidentials that scope over nominals, and are fused with the determiner/demonstrative systems or with nominal tense markers. I demonstrate that there are cohesive parallels in how flavors of both propositional and nonpropositional evidentiality interact with verbal and nominal tense and aspect. I use tools from modal logic to show that we can (i) unify the subdomains of evidentiality using modal accessibility relations while also preserving important distinctions between them, (ii) use the same tools to compositionally capture the interaction between evidentials and tense and aspect, and (iii) have the representation of an agent's certainty of belief be reflected in quantificational force. Concretely, directly encoding the subtype of evidence in the semantics, I argue that three distinct evidential flavors embody three distinct spatio-temporal modal accessibility relations: direct (sensory) evidentials are temporally-sensitive historical necessity relations (yielding the factive nature of perception); inferential evidentials of pure reasoning are epistemic accessibility relations; inferential evidentials of results are a combination of the above two.

  PublisherDOI

• What gerund complements tell us about deontic necessity modals

  Movebank · 2021-09-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This work is an exploration of the interaction between deontic necessity modals and the obligatorily gerundive complements they take in South Asian languages, with a focus on Bangla. We investigate a novel semantic category of gerunds – which we call gen-gerunds –arguing that they contain special morphology that embodies a relation between a deontic neces-sity and a set of eventualities that this necessity holds over. This morphology turns gen-gerunds into definite descriptions, unlike regular gerunds. Focusing futher on the (in)compatibilities between regular and gen-gerunds and strong and weak deontic necessity, we argue that the composition is affected by the nominal or predicative status of the modals, and these effects directly inform the distribution of these elements. We connect our account to interaction with negation and copulas with strong and weak necessity as well, and argue that the combined fac-tors of the semantics of gerunds and the categorial semantics of the modals themselves provide the answers to our main questions.

  PublisherDOI

• Situation types in complementation: Oromo attitude predication

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2021-03-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Though languages show rich variation in the clausal embedding strategies employed in attitude reports, most mainstream formal semantic theories of attitudes assume that the clausal complement of an attitude verb contributes at least a proposition to the semantics. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the growing cross-linguistic perspective of attitudes by providing semantic analyses for the two embedding strategies found with attitude verbs in Oromo (Cushitic): verbal nominalization, and embedding under akka 'as'. We argue that Oromo exemplifies a system in which non-speech attitudes uniformly embed situations rather than propositions, thereby expanding the empirical landscape of attitude reports in two ways: (i) situations and propositions are both ontological primitives used by languages in the construction of attitude reports, and (ii) attitude verbs in languages like Oromo do the semantic heavy lifting, contributing the "proposition" to propositional attitudes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What gerunds tell us about deontic necessity: A Relativized Ranked Priority Clusters model

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science
  Publisher

• Unifying perception across nominal and propositional domains

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2020-07-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Semantics of Evidentials in Questions

  Journal of Semantics · 2020 · 33 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Abstract This paper presents a novel cross-linguistic exploration of the phenomenon of Interrogative Flip at the semantics-pragmatics interfaces. Most previous studies describe an obligatory shift in the anchor of an evidential from the speaker to the addressee in interrogatives, across a diverse set of languages. In this work, we discuss a lesser-studied set of facts, which show that in many languages this shift does not take place. Modeling the contribution of evidentials with ‘judge’-sensitivity in the semantics and with newly refined notions of commitment and sourcehood in an extended dynamic pragmatics framework, the presence or absence of Interrogative Flip is shown to lie in an evidential’s ability to license a commitment update operator $\uparrow $. All attested evidential systems are shown to fall in either the class of $\uparrow $ licensors or not, with apparent exceptions explained across a heterogeneous array of data. A dynamic polar question operator is formulated and its interaction with $\uparrow $ explored. Finally, a novel link between evidentiality and bias is established, by arguing that the lack of the Flip results in biased questions.

  PublisherDOI

• Epistemic modals, deduction, and factivity: new insights from the epistemic future

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2019-12-09 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  The epistemic future (e.g., the epistemic uses of English will) is often analyzed on a par with epistemic must. We provide novel empirical evidence from English and Romanian in deduction and factive contexts to argue that this identical treatment is not warranted. We propose a unified solution based on novel ways to (i) look at weakness in must and will and (ii) encode the factive presupposition when the complement of the factive is a modalized proposition (an interaction that, to our knowledge, has not been analyzed formally before). The account connects to existing debates on strength in necessity modals, on epistemic future and future tense, and on the embedding of epistemic (and other flavor) modals under attitudes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Questioning speech acts

  ZAS Papers in Linguistics · 2018-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We investigate the sentence-final particle ho from Cantonese, which can stack on topof other sentence-final particles indicating various types of speech acts. We argue that ho is ahigher level question operator that operates at the level of speech acts. More concretely, it takesa speech act (assertion or question) and returns a new interrogative speech act asking whether theinput speech act can be felicitously performed by the addressee. We take the presence of thiskind of higher level question operator in natural language as novel evidence that a mechanism foroperating on speech acts is needed. Building on Farkas and Bruce (2009), Rawlins (2010), Bledinand Rawlins (2017), we develop a mechanism in the style of Update Semantics for operating onspeech acts.Keywords: speech acts, sentence-final particles, Cantonese, update semantics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jess H.-K. Law

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  3 shared

• Arka Banerjee

  R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital

  2 shared

• Shannon Bryant

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  1 shared

• Anamaria Fălăuș

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  1 shared

• Teodora Mihoc

  Quantitative BioSciences

  1 shared

• Haoze Li

  Harbin Institute of Technology

  1 shared

• Haoze Li

  Nanyang Technological University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER: Theory, Fieldwork, and Typology: A Semantic/Prag…
• GIA from the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR…