​Linmin Zhang
Composing conceptual and logical information:
Semantic processing in the left hemisphere word by word.
Sunday 14:00
Presenting work on computational details of a fronto-temporal network covering left anterior temporal cortex and adjacent regions in processing simple sentences containing functional words that encode logical operators.
With the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a word-by-word presentation paradigm, we have found, for the first time, that the processing of logical operators (e.g., sentential negation) interacts with the processing of conceptual knowledge in the left hemisphere in forming mental representations varying in specificity, suggesting that both lexical and functional words modulate brain activation in integrating information and facilitating interlocutors to focus their attention to specific situations or items from the vast set of possibilities in the environment. For more information, see my personal page.
​Ash Asudeh
Substitution Puzzles
Saturday 17:45
The failure of substitution of coreferential terms is a well known puzzle in semantics and the philosophy of language. The paradigmatic case, following Frege, is the non-equivalence of (1) and (2), despite the fact that Muhammad Ali and Cassius Clay are different names for the same individual.
(1) Kim believes Muhammad Ali was a great boxer.
(2) Kim believes Cassius Clay was a great boxer.
In this talk I will show that substitution puzzles are in fact even more general than this. I will informally sketch a solution to the generalized problem of substitution puzzles, based on a formal construct from category theory: monads. The basic intuition is that substitution puzzles can be explained through a notion of 'perspective'.
This talk is based on this paper.
For more information, see my personal page.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS.
Heather Newell, UQAM
What’s in a word?
Friday 17:45
This talk will cover various current questions that linguists have about the status of ‘wordhood’. Interestingly, some phonological theories propose that phonological structure matches morpho-syntactic structure in certain ways to give us words, but each of these theories needs different tools to account for the inter- and intra-linguistic variation that we see. Morpho-syntacticians, on the other hand, often propose that the notion of word is not a primitive, raising questions about whether it is definable at all. I will discuss words of different sizes, with different phonological and morpho-syntactic characteristics, and their implications for how to build an explanatory linguistic theory of ‘wordhood’.
For more information, see my personal page.