Rising declaratives provide a challenging test case for theories of the semantics-pragmatics interface that aim to explain why the main clause types are canonically linked to certain discourse functions. For … Read More
Trivalent Strong Exhaustivity – towards a uniform semantics for question embedding Danny Fox, MIT Abstract In this talk I will go over well-known arguments that there are three different interpretive schemas … Read More
How children are and aren’t like adults when interpreting pronouns: A computational cognitive modeling investigation Lisa S. Pearl Abstract: Interpreting pronouns in context is a complex linguistic task, especially … Read More
Revisiting nominal licensing in Zulu Claire Halpert Abstract: The questions of whether and how nominals are syntactically licensed in Bantu languages have been a matter of recent active debate … Read More
Building prosodic trees Kristine M. Yu Abstract: Computational perspectives from string grammars have richly informed our understanding of phonological patterns in natural language in the past decade. However, a prevailing … Read More
Syntactic structure building: lessons from periphrasis Asia Pietraszko Abstract: Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat the auxiliary verbs be and have as lexical items that enter syntactic … Read More
A theory of oddness Amir Anvari Abstract: We will rehearse a host of puzzles that have been uncovered in the literature on oddness pertaining particularly, but not exclusively, to … Read More
Building machines that process natural language like human Yohei Oseki Abstract: Despite the close alliance in the 1980s, theoretical linguistics (a branch of cognitive science) and natural language processing … Read More
Speaker: Luke Adamson (Rutgers) Title: A noun's gender is locally determined: Evidence from gender and possession Abstract: What determines a noun’s grammatical gender? Often this question is posed in terms … Read More
Speaker: Aaron White (University of Rochester) Title: Semantic Category Induction Abstract: Our ability to use language to convey arbitrarily complex information about the world's possible past, present, and future … Read More