LogicalFun

As of 2023, I am the PI of the International Research Project LogicalFun (Logic and Language: Crosslinguistic Variation in the Semantics of Functional Words), a 5-year grant funded by the CNRS Humanities & Social Sciences. The consortium includes the following partner institutions:

Events

K. Davidson, Polar questions in ASL as an insight into information structure

Many – perhaps all – sign languages seem to make use of an information structural strategy of using a question and its answer in a single clause, similar in some ways to spoken language pseudoclefts but, unlike pseudoclefts and more like conditionals, including polar questions as well. We’ll look at what the use of polar questions in Question-Answer Clauses in sign languages says about scope and information structure more generally. Based on Gonzalez et al 2019 and Davidson and Caponigro 2011.

K. Davidson, Depiction and reasoning over alternatives

Depiction accompanying spoken and written language can frequently be ignored when it comes to compositional semantics, but sign languages illustrate the tight connection, as well as important differences, between depictive and symbolic content. In particular, when it comes to reasoning over alternatives, as in negation and forming questions, we see depiction pulling apart from symbolic language in a way that speaks to theories of the connection between language and thought. Based on Davidson 2024 (forthcoming in CUP Elements in Semantics).

F. Roelofsen, Polar questions in Sign Language of the Netherlands with varying speaker belief and contextual evidence

We identify several polar question forms in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)through a production experiment in which we manipulate two types of biases: (i) the prior expectations of the person asking the question, and (ii) the evidence available in the immediate context of utterance. Based on Oomen and Roelofsen 2023 and recent further analysis.

F. Roelofsen, New methods for measuring, analyzing and visualizing facial expressions

This talk explores new methods for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing facial expressions and demonstrate the utility of these methods in a case study on polar questions in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Based on Esselink et al 2023 and recent further developments.

  • The semantics of correlatives across languages, November 2023, Project meeting, program
Project abstract

The project aims to analyze the relevance of logical properties for the study of natural language phenomena, by showing that the ability to reason and draw inferences is an essential component of speakers’ semantic competence and, more generally, of the human language capacity. To this end, the project combines formal and crosslinguistic approaches to meaning to propose an in-depth and wide-ranging joint investigation of polarity and wh-systems, two linguistic phenomena that are typically investigated separately, despite the fact that they present pervasive morpho-syntactic and semantic connections across languages. Polarity-sensitive and wh-expressions are attested universally and are closely related to more commonly studied logical operators (connectives, quantifiers), yet have more complex distributional and interpretive properties across languages. They display remarkable sensitivity to the logical properties of the context where they occur, making them privileged areas to investigate the manifestations of logical resources in natural language and the influence of structure and context on semantic composition. The research currently planned in “LogicalFun” is organized in three work packages:

  • Crosslinguistic and language-internal diversity: provide a solid and diverse crosslinguistic empirical base for the joint study of polarity and wh-systems, which can serve as a basis for future studies of the two phenomena, regardless of the theoretical framework;
  • Meaning strengthening: propose unified alternative-based semantic analyses that explain the observed patterns and capture the attested variation, across phenomena and across paradigms;
  • Formal model: develop a valid and cognitively realistic model of the underlying semantic competence, responsible for speakers’ intuitions, with a full inventory of the building blocks and the meaning composition rules associated with these phenomena.