Guest speaker: Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney University)

The Department of French is hosting a talk by Lyn Tieu (BA 2007, MA 2008), who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2013. She is now a Research Fellow at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Macquarie University, and works extensively on semantic and morphosyntactic aspects of L1 acquisition. Her talk, "L'étude psycholinguistique des inférences linguistiques" ("The psycholinguistic investigation of linguistic inferences"), is taking place on Thursday, March 11, at 4:00 PM. Note that the language of the talk is French. Guests from departments aside from French are welcome to attend; to register, send an email to the Departmental Secretary, whose address can be found here.

(Language allows us to convey a wealth of information by means of linguistic inferences - the subject of a large number of studies in contemporary academic linguistics. For instance, the sentence 'Marie likes some of her classes' expresses a positive sentiment on Marie's part towards her classes, but can also convey the negative message that she doesn't like all of her classes. The ability to disentangle the many complexities of linguistic meaning and navigate the various inferences ubiquitous in everyday conversation is central to linguistic communication, and we typically use this ability without even having to think about it. But what is the precise nature of this ability, and where does it come from? My research primarily focuses on the nature of linguistic inferences - their representation in the grammar, their acquisition in childhood, and where they might originate in terms of cognition. In this presentation, I will discuss two recent discoveries from my research. First, some inferences emerge earlier than others in early childhood development, which could illuminate the grammatical representation of linguistic inferences. Second, I will show that even nonlinguistic objects such as gestures or sound effects or emoji can yield linguistic inferences, which suggests that the cognitive source of linguistic inferences is more general than has been proposed to date. These two findings demonstrate that, taken together, psycholinguistic methods and formal linguistic theory can bring us to a better understanding of the cognitive architecture underlying linguistic meaning.)