Week of Apr 14

Hayley Ross Thesis Defence

Fifth-year student Hayley Ross is defending her thesis this Wednesday April 16, at 2:00pm in Boylston Hall 103. The title and abstract of her thesis can be found below. 

Title: Artificial intelligence and fake reefs: what privative inferences and LLMs tell us about adjective-noun composition

Abstract: The fact that people understand completely novel phrases is often taken as an argument that linguistic meaning is composed from the meaning of its parts. Thus, a central concern for the study of meaning is how that meaning is composed, especially for open-class content words like adjectives and nouns. This dissertation studies meaning composition and its interaction with context through the lens of adjective-noun modification and the privative inferences that sometimes result (e.g., a fake gun is (usually) not a gun, and a stone lion is not a (living) lion). This dissertation shows that privativity is not limited to a particular class of adjectives, which leads to a new, non-intersective semantics for adjective-noun modification which handles potential contradictions as part of composition. Further, we find that humans and modern large language models (LLMs) can generalize to the inferences of adjective-noun combinations that they have not seen before. Working with LLMs foregrounds the possibility that these inferences could be drawn by other means than meaning composition, such as memorization or analogy. The resulting adaptation in experiment design as well as reflection on our standards of evidence feeds into the broader, currently emerging discussion about how to study compositionality in humans and language models alike. 

 

GSAS Indo-European & Historical Linguistics Workshop

The ninth GSAS Indo-European & Historical Linguistics Workshop talk of the 2024-2025 academic year will take place this Friday! Mark Hale will be presenting research on Friday April 18 at 5pm. The talk will be followed by a small reception. Please find all details below.

Speaker: Mark Hale (Concordia University Montréal)

Time: Friday April 18 at 5pm EDT

Location: Boylston 335 (Linguistics department, third floor)

Title: “Back from the Dead: Recovering West Germanic Prosody [or, Forty Years in the Wilderness]”

Abstract: Hale (1984) treated some aspects of the prosody-syntax connection in the Old Saxon Heliand. This paper treats the intriguing question of whether I have learned anything about such matters in the past 41 years, and if so, what, with some important life-lessons drawn from my trajectory then-til-now. The data discussed will include material from Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian, and Old High German. And maybe Latin.

Look forward to seeing all of you!

 

Fall Registration Deadline

Fall registration is closing on Wednesday April 16. Please consider the fantastic courses offered by the Department of Linguistics including: 

  • LING 83: Language, Structure and Cognition;
  • LING 106: Knowledge of Meaning; 
  • LING 103: Language in its Social Context;
  • LING 108: Introduction to Historical Linguistics

If you have had fun in any of these courses, please spread the word to your friends and classmates so that more people can enjoy linguistics! 

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