About me

I am currently an Associate of the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University, affiliated with the Meaning & Modality Laboratory. I work primarily in experimental semantics. I received my PhD from Harvard in 2026, and my dissertation focused on the semantics of (in)definiteness in languages with and without articles, providing experimental evidence about contextual and syntactic factors contributing to bare noun interpretation. My research is advised by Dr. Gennaro Chierchia and Dr. Kathryn Davidson.

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, and what custom language benchmarks can reveal about the linguistic abilities of large language models.

As an experimental linguist, I’ve worked with English and Russian; as a fieldworker, I have worked with Uralic and Turkic languages spoken in Russia (Moksha, Erzya Mordvin, Hill Mari, Northern Khanty, Chuvash), as well as with iciBemba. My fieldwork has covered a range of various topics, including the semantics of indefinite pronouns, differential subject marking, and the syntax and semantics of non-finite embedded clauses.

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.