About Yiqian
I am a second-year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Harvard, specializing in semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces.
Research interests: My research interests center on the typology of inferences – how they are represented and how they arise. I am currently working on projects investigating presuppositions, focusing on how they project across disjunction and how they are triggered by certain types of words. I approach these questions through a combination of formal linguistic theory and human behavioral experiments, and am trying to incorporate methods from information theory and computational modeling. More broadly, I am fascinated by the expressive power of natural language and the relative reliability of communication.
Before coming to Harvard, I completed my undergraduate study at Tsinghua University (2020 September – 2024 June), where I built a background in linguistics, philosophical logic, and English literature.
Conference Talks
- Wang, Yiqian, and Kathryn Davidson. 2025. "Presupposition filtering in disjunction: What role does exclusive interpretation play?" Talk at Sinn und Bedeutung 30, Frankfurt, Germany. Slides
- Wang, Yiqian. 2025. "Presupposition filtering in disjunction: Does exclusive interpretation play a role?" Talk at the 11th Experimental Pragmatics Conference (XPRAG), Cambridge, UK. Slides
News
- — Co-organizing Harvard’s Language and Cognition talk series .