The anaphoric potential of demonstrative descriptions

in this cross-linguistic collaborative project, Ankana Saha, Yağmur Sağ, Jian Cui, and Kathryn Davidson investigate the contrast in acceptability of definite expressions and demonstratives in anaphoric contexts in English, Bangla, Turkish, and Mandarin to understand the core building blocks of definiteness in Language. (More information)

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Adjective-noun composition in humans and large language models

In this project, Hayley Ross works on compositionality through the lens of experimental semantics, specifically focusing on adjective-noun composition with so-called privative adjectives like fake or counterfeit in human languages and language models. (More information)

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Pragmatic inferences triggered by the iconic use of space in sign and in gesture

Anastasia Tsilia works on an experimental project with Kathryn Davidson, focusing on whether co-speech gestures can license complement anaphora with positive quantifiers like ‘most’. She investigates the interaction of negation with iconicity, more specifically, the iconic inferences of existence triggered by iconic loci in American Sign Language (ASL) as well as by iconic co-speech gestures in English. (More information)

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Investigating embedding and the role of non-manuals in ASL imperatives

In this project, Marianthi Koraka investigates the possible manual and non-manual elements that are used for the expression of imperative speech acts in American Sign Language (ASL). (More information)

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Interpreting noun phrases in belief reports – the de re/de dicto competition

Yuhan Zhang investigates the empirical landscape of de re/de dicto acceptability by using an experimantal behavioral methods. They aim to solidify the empirical foundation for formal semantic theory development and endorse the practice of collecting reliable empirical judgment data for nuanced semantic phenomena. (More information)

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