Nina Haket

Postdoctoral Affiliate

University of Cambridge

nch35 [at] cam.ac.uk

I’m on the Job Market

I finished my PhD in 2026 and I’m looking for academic positions starting autumn 2027. My work sits between philosophy of language and linguistics, and I do both the theory and the empirical side of it. If you think there might be a fit, do get in touch at nch35 [at] cam.ac.uk.

About Me

I’m a linguist and a philosopher of language. I work on word meaning — how it works, how it shifts over time, and what happens when people try to change it on purpose.

I finished my PhD at Cambridge in 2026, supervised by Kasia Jaszczolt. It was about conceptual engineering, the practice of deliberately revising what a word means. My argument was that the field has been looking at the wrong unit: it treats words in isolation, when what people actually communicate is whole propositions, assembled from the words plus context plus a good deal of unspoken assumption. I used Kasia’s Default Discourse Semantics to make that case properly, and then tested it with corpus data and experiments instead of leaving it as theory.

Right now I’m a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Cambridge, and I work on the FORSA project at the University of East Anglia, on how ideas of forgiveness differ between Xhosa- and English-speaking communities in South Africa and what that means for restorative justice. Earlier in 2026 I spent six months at UEA with Eugen Fischer and Paul Engelhardt, running the statistics for experiments on how the stereotypes attached to a word can push people into bad reasoning. I’m still working with them on it.

Before Cambridge I did a research master’s at Leiden. The upshot of all this is a slightly odd combination of skills: formal semantics and philosophy of language on one side, corpus methods, NLP and statistics on the other. It’s a useful place to stand, since the questions I care about tend to need both.

Research in Plain English

Ask what “marriage” means and you’ll get a different answer now than you would have got fifty years ago. That shift didn’t just happen to the language — people fought over it, in courts and newspapers and at kitchen tables, until the word moved. I’m interested in how that process actually works.

The field I work in is called conceptual engineering: the deliberate attempt to change what a word means, usually because someone thinks the current meaning is unfair, unclear, or doing real damage. My work argues that this is much harder than it’s usually assumed to be. You can announce a new definition, but you can’t dictate the assumptions people already carry around with the word, and you certainly can’t control what it comes to mean in an actual sentence in an actual conversation.

Rather than just asserting that, I try to show it. I use language models to map how a word is really used across thousands of recorded conversations, and I run studies where people read slightly different phrasings of the same argument, to see how much the wording changes the conclusion they reach. It usually changes it more than people expect.

Research Interests

Areas of specialisation: Conceptual Engineering, Language Change, Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary, Word Meaning

Areas of competence: Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Philosophy of Language, Experimental Philosophy

Methods and Skills

Experimental and quantitative

Large-scale study design and administration (Prolific, Qualtrics)
Statistical modelling in R: linear and cumulative mixed-effects models, ordinal regression, growth curve analysis, Wilcoxon tests, inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s kappa)
Sensitivity and cluster analyses; hierarchical clustering

Computational and corpus

BERT-based distributional semantic modelling, large language models, and embedding analysis
Corpus compilation, annotation, and analysis
Python for NLP tasks; LaTeX for document preparation

Qualitative and theoretical

Discourse analysis and qualitative data annotation
Theoretical semantics and pragmatics
Multi-layer annotation schema development and inter-annotator reliability

news

Aug 01, 2026	I’ve been invited to give a talk at the Valence Asymmetries seminar, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, in 2027.
Jun 15, 2026	My corrected PhD thesis was approved by the University of Cambridge in June 2026.
Jun 01, 2026	I submitted my corrected PhD thesis to the University of Cambridge on 1st June 2026.
Mar 17, 2026	I passed my PhD viva on 17th March 2026. Many thanks to my examiners for a stimulating discussion.
Jan 31, 2026	I submitted my PhD thesis, “Navigating Meaning Spaces: A Contextualist Perspective on Conceptual Engineering,” to the University of Cambridge on 31st January 2026.

Selected Publications

From Words to Propositions: Rethinking Meaning Construction in Conceptual Engineering

N. Haket

Synthese, 2026

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Conceptual Engineering (CE) aims to improve linguistic meanings for theoretical, social, or political purposes, yet faces persistent implementation challenges. This paper argues that effective intervention requires understanding how propositional content emerges from interactions between lexical meanings and contextual factors. I evaluate different theories of propositions and argue that dynamic functional propositions, formalised through Default Discourse Semantics (DDS), provide a suitable framework for CE. DDS models how different information sources and processes interact to construct communicated content. Using formal analysis and a hypothetical case study, I illustrate what propositional CE would require and suggest how this framework might inform intervention strategies.
BERT’s Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning

Nina Haket, and Ryan Daniels

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2025

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Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes – 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words – that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words.
Collaborative Conceptual Engineering: Philosophy and Linguistics

N. Haket

In Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues, 2024

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Conceptual Engineering, the critical assessment and amelioration of our concepts, has recently become a veritable buzzword in the field of Philosophy. However, in this work, I argue that Linguistics should have a place in Conceptual Engineering (CE) moving forward, both from an empirical and theoretical angle. After first rejecting the notion that Linguistics cannot be combined with a normative process such as CE, I explore a case study of mass and weight in Early Modern Scientific English with the intent of highlighting the useful insights linguistic empirical tools can bring. I then discuss an interesting contribution to CE from linguistics that comes from pragmatic theories that make psychologically real meaning the focus of attention, in contrast to the more traditional Fregean picture of propositions. In light of this, I discuss a potential semantic framework for CE rooted in linguistics, namely Default Semantics. I consequently discuss how CE could operate within such a linguistic framework and turn to philosophy to help answer some questions linguists cannot. I conclude that CE should be a collaborative enterprise in the future, involving both linguists and philosophers, and that progress can and should be made through such interdisciplinary work.