Week of March 20
Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop
Axel Palmér (Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden)
Title : ‘The European Precursors of Indo-Iranian’
Thursday March 23 | 5:00- 6:30 PM | Boylston Hall 335
Harvard LangCog
Irene Canudas Grabolosa (Harvard) Title: Children's understanding of entailment in conditionals Abstract: When processing language, humans constantly compute entailments and implicatures. But how essential are language and communication to entailment and implicature calculation? Some semanticists consider them a core property of human languages (Su et al., 2012) since entailment seems to govern the distributional properties of certain expressions in all studied languages (Ladusaw, 1979; Horn, 1989). If such a perspective is correct, entailment could have a fundamental role not only in language (and language acquisition) but also in thought.Through a series of 4 studies, I take entailment as a case study for my deeper interest in investigating whether it can inform us about the structure of thought. The focus will be to explore to what extent children who are still in the process of becoming competent in language are already sensitive to entailment relations in the context of conditional sentences. Tuesday March 21 | 5:30-7:00 PM | William James Hall #1550
Harvard at HSP
The 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing took place March 9-11th at the University of Pittsburgh. The following members of Harvard Linguistics presented their work.
Yuhan Zhang presented two posters. One is a first-authored project "Pronoun use reflects gender bias against different occupations" in co-authorship with Xinrui Li (The Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University) and Lin Bian (University of Chicago). The other one is a collaborative work with, Masoud Jasbi (UC Davis), Natalia Bermudez (Harvard), Réka Siro (University of Edinburgh), and Kathryn Davidson titled "Crosslinguistic Interpretation of Logical Connectives: Negation, Conjunction, and Disjunction in English, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish".
Daria Bikina presented a poster titled "Chasing pragmatics: an experimental study of bare noun interpretation".
Ross at MIT
Hayley Ross gave the following talk at the Exp/Comp reading group at MIT on March 10th.
Title: Adjective-noun compositionality in humans and language models
Abstract: A key component of human language is compositionality: the idea that we assemble the meaning of a sentence or phrase in a structured process from the meanings of its parts. When language models encounter a phrase like blue cup or fake gun, do they engage in any compositional process? Do they know that a blue cup is a thing which is blue and which is a cup – but that a fake gun is not a gun? I focus on adjective-noun compositionality, specifically with so-called privative adjectives, to try to get insight into whether neural language models learn about compositionality from their next word prediction objective, or whether they are merely memorising specific phrases. For that matter, do humans treat rare but plausible phrases like counterfeit scarf compositionally, or do they actually also rely on conventionalised meaning to know how to interpret such combinations? What is the relationship between frequency and ease of understanding? In this talk, I'll present a series of experiments designed to tackle these questions.
Bondarenko at CNRS
Tanya Bondarenko gave a virtual talk on March 13 at the CNRS syntax and semantics seminar on "Veridicality Mismatches in Javanese"
TU+ at Harvard
The eighth Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic was hosted at Harvard on March 4-5, 2023. The following members of Harvard Linguistics presented their work
Jack Rabinovitch gave a talk titled "Island sensitivity and case matching in Uyghur pseudoprolepsis"
Yağmur Sağ, Ömer Demirok, & Muhammet Bal gave a talk titled "Subject pseudo-incorporation in Laz"
Congratulations to all organisers and volunteers!
