Nadine Bade, M.A.

Research Interests:
Semantics
Semantic-Pragmatic Interface
Context-Theory
Poetry of Emily Dickinson 

I studied English Linguistics and Rhetorics at the University of Tübingen. During these studies my interest in formal semantics developed. It deepened after visiting the linguistics department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and working as a teaching assistant and research assistant for the project B2 at the Collaborative Research Center 833 in Tübingen. The project investigates how presuppositions are processed using methods from psycholinguistics and neuroscience. As a result of my work for the project, my M.A. thesis discussed the question how presuppositions are triggered by taking into consideration processing data. 

During the work for my thesis I learned more about the empirical difficulties semantics has to deal with when it comes to the understanding of context-dependent phenomena like presuppositions. I decided to do further research at the semantics-pragmatics interface to be able to better understand how context influences semantic interpretation. I started working for the project A2 at the Collaborative Research Center whose aim it is to investigate how the principle of intepretability is violated in poetic texts.

One key point of the work of A2 is to discover how context can help reinterpret these seeminlgy uninterpretable structures in poetry. Along with the work for the project I am working for a Ph.D. in English Linguistics with Prof. Dr. Sigrid Beck and Prof. Dr. Matthias Bauer as my advisors. The work on my dissertation is driven by the question which theory of context in semantics makes right predictions for context-sensitive phenomena, especially presuppositions. The poems the project A2 analyses are one empirical foundation in pursuing this question. Furthermore, I plan on exploiting other empirical methods to be able to explain the influence of context.

You can download my CV here.