About

My name is Anastasia Tsilia and I am a PhD candidate at MIT Linguistics. My dissertation focuses on non-negative usages of negation in exclamatives. My dissertation chair is Sabine Iatridou, and my committee also consists of Amir Anvari, Kathryn Davidson, Viola Schmitt, and Hedde Zeijlstra. Before coming to MIT, I did a Masters in Cognitive Science (Cogmaster), co-hosted by École Normale Supérieure and École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. There, I double-majored in linguistics and philosophy and my Masters thesis, entitled Embedded Tense: Insights from Modern Greek, was co-supervised by Philippe Schlenker and Amir Anvari. Even before that, I did my undergrad in Philosophy & Logic at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

My broad research interests are semantics, the syntax-semantic interface, pragmatics, iconicity and gestures. I am also interested in experimentally testing predictions of theories.

More narrowly, I am interested in tense semantics,  and specifically in the typology and the cross-linguistic aspect of sequence of tense, shiftable tense, future markers, and temporal pronouns. I also work on the syntax-semantic interface, investigating the semantics of proleptic constructions, and definiteness in clausal subjects. Finally, I am interested in negation, especially its pleonastic or expletive uses, as well as in its interaction with co-speech gestures. 

Outside of linguistics, I like watching movies, visiting exhibitions, and traveling.