Hana Filip

About

I am a linguist specializing in semantics, the study of meaning in language. My research is motivated by questions concerning the conceptual foundations of semantics; it is mainly grounded in formal semantics and pragmatics, and often specifically in mereological (event) semantics.

My main focus is on aspect, genericity, mass/count distinction, interaction of noun phrase semantics with verbal aspect, (in)definiteness, and context-dependence in semantic interpretation. My approach brings together formal and lexical semantics, with particular attention to questions at the intersection of morphology, syntax, and logic. It is also informed by insights from the philosophy of language, psychology as well as by cross-linguistic and typological perspectives on semantics.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. My thesis advisors were Paul Kay, Charles J. Fillmore, Sam Mchombo, and Alan Timberlake. It was published in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series (Larry Horn, editor), Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, in 1999, and reprinted in 2016 and 2022. DOI: 10.4324/9780203827413   (See also below.)

Before coming to Düsseldorf, I taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, the University of Rochester in the Department of Linguistics and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Florida. I also held appointments as a computational linguist at SRI International in Menlo Park, in the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley, working in the Artificial Intelligence Group, and as a research associate at Berkeley Speech Technologies, Inc.

I am an Associate Editor of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics, and serve on the Editorial Board of Semantics and Pragmatics.

Published August 2026

Objects and the Grammar of Countability
Peter R. Sutton and Hana Filip

The Oxford University Press website

This book proposes an object-centred and contextualist account of the count/mass distinction, defined in mereological terms. The main empirical finding is that there is a connection between variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns across and within languages and the ways in which nouns, mass or count, can diverge from manifesting the canonical grammatical reflexes expected of the count/mass distinction in a given language. No extant count/mass theory can motivate this striking connection. It is proposed that mass -count pairs of nouns (across and within languages) lexicalize the same number-neutral core property that is satisfied by objects, defined both in mereotopological and affordance-based terms. Context plays a crucial role since it influences different ways of viewing the entities in the extension of a noun and so what counts as ‘one’ for that noun in that context. The book proposes a system of three perceptual-interactive constraints, based upon how one perceives and interacts with objects, that predicts the propensity for a core property that is satisfied by objects to nonetheless be lexicalized as mass. These constraints are also key to explaining variation in the count/mass lexicalization patterns of such properties. The book also shows how the extent to which a core property can satisfy these constraints can be estimated from a corpus, and how these corpus measures can be used to model variation in count/mass lexicalization patterns. The main data rely on concrete common nouns in number-marking languages, namely, Czech, English, Finnish, and German, but the account is also extended to abstract nouns, and to two non-number-marking languages, Mandarin and Yudja.

1999, 2016, 2022

Aspect, Eventuality Types and Noun Phrase Semantics
Hana Filip

The Taylor&Francis website

Kindle publication on Amazon.com

Barnes&Noble website

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Phone (Departmental Office): +49 211 81-12554