Nominalizing reduplication has been proposed to be a morphophonological process wherein a verb’s movement is reduplicated to procure a nominal meaning (Supalla & Newport 1978, Abner 2013). However, this process is largely unpredictable, and the construal of a morphological process leads researchers to analyze nominal signs through the lens of their verbal counterparts, which excludes repeated-movement nominals without a clear verbal pair like FATHER and APPLE. It remains unclear how and why repetition of movement arises in certain...
You can find the details of Viola's presentation here:
Worlds are not denotations The main goal of this talk is negative: I will argue that possible worlds don’t have object-language representations, as (i) readings that have been argued to require such object-language representations are more plausibly derived without them (this is based on current joint work with Ido Benbaji and Clemens Mayr) and (ii)`ontological symmetry’ (as discussed in Schlenker 2006) breaks down when considering plurality. Beyond providing evidence for the negative claim, I...
In this talk, I present two papers that discuss the gradience in the at-issueness of iconic contributions (Schlenker 2023) and (Steinbach 2023). It has been observed that co-speech gestures are a case of the interplay between speech, which contributes at-issue content, and gesture, which contributes non-at issue content. However, in the case of co-sign gestures, it seems to be the case that iconic content is more at-issue by virtue of being in the same...
What Did I Tell You? Designing Surveys to Collect Cross-Linguistic Data on Speech Reports
In this talk, I present the main driving question behind my dissertation: in speech reports, what are the possible semantic contributions of embedded clauses, and how does the (morpho-syntactic) form of the embedded clause affect these contributions? Answering such a question requires a rigorous way of comparing the meanings of speech reports cross-linguistically. In this talk, I propose one...
`The world is a complex, continuous experience, but in language and thought, we simplify this stream into events, and we categorize them by similarities, such as their participants. Where do these categorizations come from?
In this presentation, I will introduce a project centered around thematic roles from a psychological perspective. I will present a study designed to explore whether the salience that certain thematic roles exhibit in language aligns with a psychological or perceptual saliency of such roles. I will discuss the...