Aynat Rubinstein studies semantics of natural language and its interfaces with pragmatics and syntax. She is interested in the linguistic mechanisms that underlie the uniquely human ability to speak not just of the "here and now" but also to describe thoughts about the past, the future, what is possible or necessary, and what may have happened but did not come to pass. In her work, she makes use of empirical research methods including mining of large corpora (corpus linguistics), natural language processing (computational algorithms), and psycholinguistic experiments. She is leading a corpus-based investigation (ISF 2019-2022) of the development of Modern Hebrew around the turn of the 20th century.