Week of Mar 2

Beguš visiting LING 10/HUM 16

Gašper Beguš (faculty at Berkeley, Harvard PhD 2018) visited the department to talk about "Language, AI, and non-Humans" in Professor Davidson's LING 10/HUM 16: Language course. Students learned many ways in which scientific work in linguistics supports and complements increasingly critical endeavours in the humanities, from creating art, to ethics and the law, to how we think about human minds in light of recent discoveries about both artificial and other biological systems, such as his work on sperm whales with Project CETI. Many thanks to Prof. Beguš for making it here despite the blizzard!

LangCog

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be Tuesday, March 3rd, from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Johanna Alstott (MIT), and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. Food will be provided, as always!

Title: A cautionary note on word learning tasks and presupposition triggering

Abstract: A central topic in linguistic semantics is presupposition: certain words can be felicitously used only if a certain piece of information (the presupposition) is already known to the interlocutors. Cross-linguistically, some kinds of meanings tend to be presupposed more often than others, but the reason why remains an open question. For example, predicates with initial-state and change-of-state components tend to encode them as presupposition and assertion, respectively, instead of the reverse. Recently, Bade, Schlenker, and Chemla (2024)–henceforth BSC24–have argued based on a series of artificial word learning experiments that this cross-linguistic asymmetry in presupposition triggering reflects conceptual biases privileging changes-of-state over initial states. In their experiments, they gauged how participants encoded the initial-state and change-of-state entailments of a nonce verb wug, and they interpret their results as suggesting that participants treated the initial state as presupposed and the change-of-state as asserted. This finding, they argue, favors their conceptual-bias hypothesis over competing accounts. In this work, we further test the validity of BSC24’s paradigm by trying to replicate their original effect and, in parallel, ascertaining whether their results generalize to another nonce predicate. We not only fail to extend BSC24’s results to our new nonce word but also fail to replicate their original effect: our participants treated BSC24’s wug and our new nonce word as non-presuppositional. Furthermore, a closer look at BSC24’s original studies suggests that non-presuppositional construals were common there, too. We discuss several reasons why this could have been the case. All told, our outlook is pessimistic: adult artificial word-learning paradigms do not, in fact, illuminate the mechanisms of presupposition triggering.