Angelika Kratzer writes:
Emmanuel Chemla from the Institut Jean Nicod and the Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris will visit us from October 13 to October 31. He will give a series of three lectures and will also be available for individual appointments. Emmanuel is a philosopher, logician, semanticist, and psycholinguist all in one person. His lecture series will inaugurate what I hope to be a string of events in the next couple of years dedicated to:
The Investigation of Linguistic Meaning: From the Armchair to the Lab and Back
Here is a summary of Emmanuel’s lectures:
"Our language ability relies on complex rules. Combinatorial semantic rules, syntactic rules, phonological rules are all complex in the following sense: if you translate these rules in a non-linguistic domain and ask a competent speaker to apply them, these speakers would suffer (and show signs of it: slow reaction times, high error rates if that's defined, etc.). Yet, we all apply these rules, hundreds of times every day, effortlessly. That's the tension I'm interested in: the complexity of language (measured from the perspective of speakers) and the easiness with which these same speakers deploy it in language. Models coming from modern linguistics offer the means to investigate these issues, by providing the right test cases and careful descriptions of the underlying rules. I will discuss specific case studies and propose different methods to investigate this tension and see what it says about the organization of our language system.”
Lecture 1: October 15, 2:30 to 4:00. Integrative Learning Center, N400. Logic in Grammar: Parallel Investigations. Joint work with Vincent Homer and Daniel Rothschild.Joint session with Vincent Homer’s seminar.
Lecture 2: October 22: 4:00 to 5:30. Integrative Learning Center, N400. Concepts in a lexicon: Learning homophony. Innateness and Bayesianism. Joint work with Isabelle Dautriche.Joint session with Alejandro Pérez-Carballo’s and Vincent Homer’s seminars.
Lecture 3: October 27: 4:00 to 5:30. Integrative Learning Center, N400. Priming studies to study linguistic representations and operations. Joint work with Lewis Bott, Mora Maldonado, and Benjamin Spector. Joint session with Brian Dillon & Lyn Frazier’s seminar.
You are cordially invited to attend one, two, or all three of the lectures. There will be receptions after lectures 2 and 3, followed by special discussion sessions. We hope to inspire a lot of discussion and deep thinking about the arduous road from the armchair to the lab and back.
