natasha korotkova
Linguist. Photographer. Outdoor addict. Immigrant.
I am a theoretical linguist with strong interests in philosophy. I work on meaning. My research lies mainly at the intersection of formal semantics, formal pragmatics and philosophy of language, with forays into syntax, prosody, and epistemology, and always has a firm cross-linguistic component.
I am currently an Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent; tenured) at Utrecht University, where I am a researcher at the Language, Logic and Information group at the Institute for Language Sciences and teach at the University College Utrecht, a liberal arts and sciences college of Utrecht University. Before coming to the Netherlands, I worked in Germany, at the Linguistics Department in Konstanz and at the Collaborative Research Center “Construction of Meaning” in Tübingen. Before that, I received my PhD in linguistics from UCLA. And before that, I got the most excellent education in linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanities.
My research program centers on knowledge and belief: (i) the many means languages have to express epistemic and doxastic notions, (ii) the formal tools we need to descibe them, (iii) how they relate to the architercture of discourse, and (vi) how they inform our understanding of the natural language ontology. The specific phenomena I have worked on include evidentiality, modality, subjective language, attitude ascriptions, clausal complementation, speech acts, and question bias. Starting in November 2025, I will look some of those questions in my NWO XS grant "The grammar of opinion".
Contact me: n dot last name at ucla dot edu
News
- May 2026. TBA. Keynote talk at Philosophy and Generative Grammar 3.
- November 2025. "A novel perspective on question bias: The view from Russian". Invited talk at the workshop Creative Discourse beyond Discourse Expectations and Implicit Meaning, Bielefeld University, Germany.
- November 2025. Refining find: Facitivity, experience, categorical judgment. Invited talk at the workshop “Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value”, Unversity of Barcelona, Spain. (joint work w/ Pranav Anand)
- November 2025. Today we learned: English ‘come-to-know’ predicates. Invited talk at a joint session of the Valence Asymmetries Seminar Series and the GLiF Formal Linguistics Research Group Seminar, University Pompeu Fabra, Spain. (joint work w/ Pranav Anand)
- November 2025. I am starting an NWO XS project “The grammar of opinion”.
- July 2025. New manuscript: “The notional category of evidentiality”. Submitted to: Arregui, A., V. Hacquard, and M. Ippolito, The Cambirdge Handbook of Modality. [paper]
- May 2025. New paper: “Nothing to claim: Claim reports and non-endorsement”. A Festschrift in Honour of Regine Eckardt. (w/ Pranav Anand) [paper]
- February 2025. “Re-imagining question bias”. Invited talk at the 25th Szklarska Poręba Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics, Szklarska Poręba, Poland.
- January 2025. “Question bias, private beliefs and common knowledge”. Invited talk at the workshop “Background beliefs in the construction of meaning”, University of Tübingen, Germany.
- December 2024. New paper: “Facts, intentions, questions: English ‘come-to-know’ predicates in deliberative environments”. Proceedings of the 24th Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (w/ Pranav Anand) [paper]