Past Event

Please join us on Thursday, March 18th from 11:45 to 12:45, Dunton 2203, for the thirteenth talk in our 2009-2010 Cognitive Science Colloquium series. You are welcome to bring your lunch.

Speaker: Dr. Ash Asudeh, Carleton University

Title: Grammatical Architecture and the Flow of Linguistic Information

Abstract: Linguistic theory typically conceives of language as a highly complex mapping between linguistic form and linguistic meaning, where the mapping is a property of individual minds. Linguistic semantics concerns the meaning end of this mapping. An important tenet of semantics is the principle of compositionality, which states that the meaning of a linguistic expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and their arrangement. Compositional semantics is what ultimately underlies the capacity of speakers to interpret an unlimited range of novel utterances. Two approaches have arisen in compositional semantics. The rule-by-rule or categorial approach holds that syntax and semantics are constructed in parallel. The interpretive approach holds that semantics interprets the output of syntax. Many semanticists view these traditions as fundamentally equivalent. Others point to important theoretical distinctions. However, rarely is there an empirical issue that seems to favour one approach over the other. I will present such an empirical challenge based on data from Irish, Swedish, and Vata (a language of the Ivory Coast). The empirical data seems to favour the parallel approach to syntax and semantics over the interpretive approach and thus sheds new light on a fundamental cognitive capacity, compositional interpretation of language, and on the flow of information in grammatical architecture, which is a specification of a fundamental structure in the mind, the language faculty.