About me

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University, specializing in experimental semantics and syntax-semantics interface. My narrower research interests center on the semantics of bare nouns in languages with and without articles, and how it interacts with syntax, as well as prosody. My dissertation focuses on Russian, aiming to provide quantitative evidence for how these factors shape the interpretation of bare nouns in the absence of overt determiners. My research is advised by Dr. Gennaro Chierchia and Dr. Kathryn Davidson.

I conduct my experimental work in the Meaning & Modality Laboratory. I come from a fieldwork background, so I started with qualitative methods like elicitation and interviews, and now focus on larger-scale behavioral experiments, using both textual and visual stimuli to get at how people interpret meaning across different contexts. I’m especially interested in how the way we design experiments shapes the kinds of insights we can draw about language and cognition.

Previously, I have worked with Uralic and Turkic languages spoken in Russia, including Moksha, Erzya Mordvin, Hill Mari, Northern Khanty, and Chuvash. My fieldwork has covered topics such as differential subject marking, the syntax and semantics of non-finite embedded clauses, and agreement systems. I am also an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Before going to Harvard, I received a BA from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Moscow State University and an MA in Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (with a focus on Linguistic Theory and Language Description) from Higher School of Economics (Moscow), School of Linguistics.

My name is pronounced as [‘darʲjə ‘bʲikʲɪnə]. However, most Russians have full names used in “official” situations and nicknames used elsewhere, so I also go by Dasha. My pronouns are she/her.

You can reach me at dbikina at g dot harvard dot edu. Some of my work can also be found on my Github.