Research Groups: Friday, February 26

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Mireille Babineau (faculty, Department of Psychology): "Synergies in lexical and syntactic acquisition."

From a very young age, children can infer the probable meaning of a new word from its syntactic context (syntactic bootstrapping; e.g., she’s blicking > blick is an action/verb). What is the learning mechanism that enables this link from specific syntactic contexts to different semantic categories? In this talk, I’ll present results from recent experiments investigating the influence exerted by a small lexicon along with children’s distributional learning skills.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Group discussion of a paper: Remijsen, Bert, Otto Gwado Ayoker, and Signe Jørgensen (2019). Ternary vowel length in Shilluk. Phonology, 36(1), 91-125.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Semantics Research Group
Bruno Andreotti (Ph.D.): "Generics and figurative language."

In natural discourse we frequently observe words being used figuratively to convey information that deviates from their literal meaning. While we typically have no difficulty interpreting the intended message of sentences that use words in this manner, the content of these messages remains elusive from a model-theoretic perspective at both the level of semantics (w.r.t. models of truth conditions and reference) and the level of pragmatics (w.r.t. models of assertion within a discourse structure). In this paper I explore a link between predicative NPs containing a noun which receives a figurative interpretation and the generic predicates which are literally true of that same noun – e.g. the sentence 'some jobs are nightmares' conveys that some jobs are not enjoyable, scary, and/or cause anxiety, which as generic predicates are literally true of nightmares. However, not all generic truths about nightmares are conveyed by the figurative sentence – for instance, it does not convey that 'some jobs happen at night' despite it being true that some jobs happen at night and that nightmares generally happen at night. I present an analysis of this observation which combines approaches to generic predication using weak necessity in modal logic and Neo-Gricean pragmatic principles.