Dr. Hadil Karawani-Habib
Ph.D., Academic staff member
I'm a linguist interested in semantics, pragmatics, syntax-semantics interface, and philosophy of language.
I generally work on questions concerned with the interaction between semantics and pragmatics, in particular presuppositions (what is taken for granted when something is said) and implicatures (what can be taken to be meant but not straightforwardly said).
I currently work on topics related to the syntax-semantics/pragmatics of conditionals and the interaction with tense and modality (the expression of time and the space of possibilities), from a crosslinguistic perspective. For example, I look at funny uses of past tense (when "past" does not mean past, i.e. before now) as in counterfactual conditionals, counterfactual imperatives, counteridenticals, futurates, and sequence of tense.
Another topic I am curently exploring is the concept of ignorance from an epistemic and a linguistic perspective.
Short CV
I was born and raised in Jerusalem. I received my BA degree (double major in journalism & media studies and English language & linguistics) from the University of Haifa and then obtained my MA degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (in general linguistics, with the supervision of Prof. Dr. Malka Rappaport Hovav, Prof. Dr. Edit Doron, and Prof. Dr. Norah Boneh), before starting my Ph.D. studies (in language and logic) at the University of Amsterdam. My appointment in Amsterdam was within the joint project Crosslinguistic Semantics of the ACLC and the ILLC and parts of my Ph.D. studies were spent at the Linguistics Department at MIT as a guest of Prof. Dr. Sabine Iatridou.
My Ph.D. dissertation entitled The real, the fake, and the fake fake is a crosslinguistic investigation of counter-factual conditionals with special emphasis on Palestinian Arabic and was promoted by Prof. Dr Frank Veltman and Prof. Dr Josep Quer.
I started a research post-doc position at Leibniz-ZAS in 2016, working on non-past (modal) uses of past tense morphology. This project is funded by the DFG and is in collaboration with PIs Prof. Dr Manfred Krifka and Prof. Dr Hedde Zeijlstra. In 2019, I started working within the department of philosophy at the University of Konstanz, with Prof. Dr Thomas Müller's DFG project "What IF?"
I live in Konstanz with my husband Filip Habib and our two children Tarik Luka and Mina Rafaelle.
Research Position at the department of philosophy
I have a research position at the philosophy department to work on the DFG project "Different kinds of conditionals: Coin tosses and kangaroos in the forest of alternative possibilities".
Our project works on providing a novel, unified analysis of conditional sentences (“if A then C”) that acknowledges a fine-grained distinction of different kinds of conditionals, employing a formal framework that can represent different kinds of possibilities. The project brings together insights, so far unconnected, from the philosophical study of the formal and metaphysical aspects of varieties of possibilities and from the linguistic study of the interaction of modals and tenses in the compositional structure of conditional sentences.
Teaching at the department of philosophy
2021 Sose Ignorance in Philosophy and Language (Hauptseminar) with Dr. Verena Wagner
Lectures
Modal Logic and Modal Language: strength, duality and social meaning - a perspective from experimental semantics, database analysis, and cross-linguistic typology
Logik Kolloquium, Universität Konstanz
13 Dezember 2021, 15:15 - 16:45 Uhr
Online