Welcome to the lab!


mms.jpg
Welcome to the Meaning and Modality (M&M) Laboratory at Harvard Linguistics! We are interested in understanding the uniquely human capacity for language, especially the ability to convey abstract, infinite, specific meanings across a variety of modes for natural language, including both speech and sign. Our work spans the subfields of formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, bilingualism, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics in an effort to understand the relationship between linguistic meaning, language mode, language development, and human cognition.

 

Latest News

Kate at the Amsterdam Colloquium

December 19, 2019
Kate Davidson gave an invited talk during the regular programme of the Amsterdam Colloquium on "Alternatives: The View from Sign Language Loci". With one workshop at the AC on semantic universals/understudied languages and another on "superlinguistics" (including lots on pointing and gesture) it was a particularly intellectually exciting colloquium for our lab this year! 

Our lab at NELS

October 27, 2019
Conference presenter (white woman with brown hair) next to large screen with powerpoint slide of data sources at NELS conference

Kate Davidson was an invited speaker at NELS 50 @ MIT, talking about "Is "experimental" a gradable predicate?", and Dorothy Ahn presented a talk on "ASL IX to locus as a modifier". (Thanks to Byron Ahn for the photo!)

 

Our lab at GLOW-in-Asia

September 23, 2019
Dorothy Ahn at podium presenting talk with slides, shows talk title
Dorothy Ahn presented a talk on joint work with Annemarie Kocab and Kate Davidson on "The role of contrast in anaphoric expressions in ASL" at GLOW-in-Asia XII in Seoul, Korea in August. (Thanks to Mitcho Erlewine for the great photo.)

NSF CAREER Award

July 1, 2019
Our lab is thrilled to begin several large projects (both in the lab and in our community) in the coming 5 years (2019-2024) thanks to an NSF CAREER Award granted to Kate Davidson for "experimental pragmatics and semantics in visual language". Stay tuned!

Dr. Chrissy Zlogar!

May 29, 2019
chrissy_defense
Congratulations to lab member Dr. Chrissy Zlogar, who defended her dissertation An experimental pragmatic investigation of depictive co-speech gestures

Taylor Joyce to UT Austin

May 20, 2019
Congratulations to our undergraduate researcher Taylor Joyce, who will be starting the PhD program in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin this fall! We are very proud of your accomplishments, including being awarded the Donald D. Harrington Fellowship at UT Austin, and her Harvard honors thesis on A Unified Contrastive Analaysis of Lateral Shift in American Sign Language.

Our lab at GLOW 42

May 17, 2019
  • Dorothy Ahn (talk): The blocking of anaphoric bare nouns
  • Annemarie Kocab, Dorothy Ahn, Gunnar Lund, & Kathryn Davidson (poster): Reconsidering agreement in sign languages

Dr. Dora Mihoc!

May 8, 2019
Dora's defense
Congratulations to lab member Dr. Teodora (Dora) Mihoc, who defended her dissertation Decomposing logic: Modified numerals, polarity, and exhaustification

Dr. Dorothy Ahn!

April 17, 2019
Picture of Dorothy Ahn standing in front of title slide of her talk
Congratulations to lab member Dr. Dorothy Ahn, who defended her dissertation THAT Thesis: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions

Kate at Northeastern, Johns Hopkins

March 25, 2019
Kate Davidson gave two invited talks this month, one at our Boston neighbor Northeastern Univeristy's department of Psychology, and the other at Johns Hopkins department of Cognitive Science
More