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 disjunction (Singh 2008, Katzir & Singh 2014, Mayr & Romoli 2016, Mandelkern & Romoli 2018, Marty & Romoli 2021 and references therein). The ambition is … 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 (a branch of artificial intelligence) have traditionally been divorced, especially since the recent advent of deep learning. Theoretical linguistics proposed computational theories to represent linguistic … 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 of how gender is ‘assigned’, with one answer being that a noun’s gender can depend on semantic criteria (e.g. animacy, sociocultural gender), nominalizing morphology, arbitrary … 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