This week: Hanna Kiri Gunn (UC Merced), "When does drawing disciplinary boundaries become gate-keeping?"

A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, November 6, 3-4pm. Robin Jenkins will be leading the discussion on the paper “The semantics of Turkish numeral constructions” by Yağmur Sağ (in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, vol. 2, pp. 307–32).

We will hold the meeting via video conference. For the link to access the session, please refer to the Meaning Group email or contact the organizers.

The UConn Meaning Group meets on a regular (mostly weekly) basis throughout the academic year to discuss recent and ongoing work in the areas of Semantics, Pragmatics, and Philosophy of Language.

Follow the link below for details and contact information.

This week: Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler, "Political Bald-Faced Lies as Performatives"

A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

The ECOM Speaker Series is proud to present Jonathan Prather, Professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming. The title of his talk is "How the Brain Enables Imitative Learning: What Songbirds Can Teach Us About Learned Vocal Communication."

For event link, and to request for an one-one meeting with Prof. Prather, please contact aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu

Join us in the online Logic Colloquium for a talk by Sandra Villata (UConn Departments of Linguistics and Psychological Science) on

"Intermediate grammaticality"

Formal theories of grammar and traditional sentence processing models start from the assumption that the grammar is a system of rules. In such a system, only binary outcomes are generated: a sentence is well-formed if it follows the rules of the grammar and ill-formed otherwise. This dichotomous grammatical system faces a critical challenge, namely accounting for the intermediate/gradient modulations observable in experimental measures (e.g., sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by accounting for gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors (e.g., working memory limitations, reanalysis, semantics), which intervene after the syntactic module generates its output. As a test case, in this talk I will focus on a specific kind of violation that is at the core of the linguistic investigation: islands, a family of encapsulated syntactic domains that seem to prohibit the establishment of syntactic dependencies inside of them (Ross 1967). Islands are interesting because, although most linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, I will present experimental evidence revealing gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence that some island violations are interpretable. To account for these gradient data, in this talk I explore the consequences of assuming a more flexible rule-based system, where sentential elements can be coerced, under specific circumstances, to play a role that does not fully fit them. In this system, unlike traditional ones, structure formation is forced even under sub-optimal circumstances, which generates semi-grammatical structures in a continuous grammar.

Please contact Marcus Rossberg for log-in information.

https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/

The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Jonathan Prather, Professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming. Talk title and abstract TBA

This week: a session organized by the department's Climate Committee

A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

A Perspective on Self-deception

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, November 20, 3-4pm. Maggie Lee will be leading the discussion on the paper “Towards a theory of modal-temporal interaction” by Hotze Rullman and Lisa Matthewson (Language 94, pages 281-331).

We will hold the meeting via video conference. For the link to access the session, please refer to the Meaning Group email or contact the organizers.

The UConn Meaning Group meets on a regular (mostly weekly) basis throughout the academic year to discuss recent and ongoing work in the areas of Semantics, Pragmatics, and Philosophy of Language.

Follow the link below for details and contact information.