Hadas Kotek » About me

Research interests

I am a syntactician and a semanticist. I am also an experimentalist, and have worked on several understudied languages. The goal of my research is to develop an understanding of the inventory of the tools available to the language faculty: What strategies are employed during structure building in the syntax? What additional machinery must the semantics provide in order to interpret these structures? How does this inventory vary cross-linguistically, and how does it manifest itself in online processing?

My research uses a variety of experimental techniques, including sentence processing, large-scale grammaticality surveys, first language acquisition, and ERPs. Alongside experimentation, my work draws on traditional judgment data and elicitations, concentrating most recently on Chuj (Mayan) and Tibetan, as well as English, Hebrew, and German. Some of my recent research topics include:

Additional details about these and other papers and presentations can be found on my publications page. To read more about my various projects, visit the research page.

For an updated list of my presentations and publications, please consult my CV.

Academic history

My most recent academic appointment was as a Lecturer in Semantics at the Yale University Department of Linguistics. I was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor in Syntax at NYU Department of Linguistics, and I have also held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University, where my supervisor was Junko Shimoyama.

I received my PhD from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT in 2014, where I wrote a dissertation on the syntax and semantics of wh-questions. My dissertation was co-chaired by Danny Fox, Martin Hackl, Irene Heim, and David Pesetsky.

Before starting my PhD, I was a visiting student at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and had a visiting position at ZAS, working with Manfred Krifka and Hans-Martin Gärtner. I also spent one year as a Masters student at Tel-Aviv University, where I was supervised by Nirit Kadmon and had a research assistantship with Alexander Grosu. Still further back, I received a BA in Linguistics and Political Science from Tel-Aviv University.