Publications

2028

1. Contested Concepts and Conceptual Engineering

   N. Haket

   In The Cambridge Handbook of Conflict in Communication, 2028

   Under contract. First submission due January 2027; expected publication 2028

2026

1. From Words to Propositions: Rethinking Meaning Construction in Conceptual Engineering

   N. Haket

   Synthese, 2026

   Abs DOI

   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.

2. When Stereotypical Inferences Prevail in Polysemy Processing: Explaining Fallacies of Equivocation

   E. Fischer, N. Haket, K. Stanton, and 2 more authors

   2026

   Revisions submitted. Mind and Language
3. Conceptual Engineering in the Age of Emerging Tech: A Bottom-Up Approach to Lexical Semantics

   N. Haket

   In Conceptual Engineering for Emerging Technologies, 2026

   Provisionally accepted
4. Not Even Newton’s Word

   N. Haket

   2026

   Under review. Transactions of the Philological Society

2025

1. BERT’s Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning

   Nina Haket, and Ryan Daniels

   Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2025

   Abs DOI

   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.

2024

1. Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings

   L. Fonteyn, E. Manjavacas, N. Haket, and 2 more authors

   Linguistics Vanguard, 2024

   Abs DOI

   This paper explores how linguistic data annotation can be made (semi-)automatic by means of machine learning. More specifically, we focus on the use of contextualised word embeddings (vectorized representations of the meaning of word tokens based on the sentential context in which they appear) extracted by large language models. In three example case studies, we assess how the contextualised embeddings generated by LLMs can be combined with different machine learning approaches to serve as a flexible, adaptable semi-automated data annotation tool for corpus linguists. Results indicate that combining contextualised word embeddings with metric fine-tuning yields highly accurate automatic annotations.

2. Collaborative Conceptual Engineering: Philosophy and Linguistics

   N. Haket

   In Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues, 2024

   Abs DOI

   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.

2023

1. Nullius In Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus

   N. Haket

   Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 2023

   Abs

   Conceptual Engineering is the practice of improving the concepts we use for a specific purpose. However, despite involving words and their meanings, this practice has not been looked at from the perspective of linguistics. This paper takes a small, niche scientific community, namely the Royal Society, and investigates to what extent Newton’s proposed distinction between mass and weight, which can be thought of as an instance of Conceptual Engineering, was consistently used in scientific journal articles between 1700 and 1920. If successful, the scientific senses proposed by Newton should differentiate mass and weight rather than any other extra-linguistic factors. 1500 tokens of mass and weight from the Royal Society Corpus were annotated for their sense along with other linguistic and extra-linguistic features, and this data was consequently analysed using Ctrees and Random Forests. The results showed that sense was not an effective predictor of the lemma, but that extra-linguistic factors such as the author and academic field had greater predictive power. It was concluded that Newton’s Conceptual Engineering of mass and weight was unsuccessful. This work shows future research on more diverse communities with less coherent language ideologies is necessary when investigating cases of Conceptual Engineering, and also that linguists can be important contributors to Conceptual Engineering research in the future.

2021

1. Language Contact and the Phylogeny and Phonology of Early English

   N. Haket

   Journal of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Great Britain, 2021

   Abs

   This paper reviews Emonds and Faarlund’s claim that Modern English is a North Germanic rather than West Germanic language, from a phonological perspective. After evaluating their usage of theories of language contact and phylogenetic relationships, it is concluded that the only way their theory could be reconciled with current linguistic theory is to posit a set of mappings from Old Norse phonology to Old English phonology. Using etymological dictionaries, mappings are explored for gemination, Holtzman’s Law, cluster simplification, and palatalization. It is concluded that such mappings are an impossibility due to the intricacies of the phonology, and that the notion of mappings themselves has no place in a theory of language contact or a phylogenetic framework.