Date:
Thursday, October 12, 2023, 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Location:
2 Arrow, Room 420
Title: Contrastive inference in English, ASL, and Mandarin
Kate will present some fresh results of an experimental pragmatics project led by last spring's co-op student Chloe Frey (who may be able to join us!) on contrastive inferences for adjectives in both English (with co-speech gesture) and ASL (including classifiers). English results are a replication of earlier contrastive inference work in gesture; extending the question to modifiers in ASL, we find that adjectival modifiers based on classifiers pattern like English adjectives and not English gesture. We will also situate these results in the context of further fresh results from a study by M&M lab summer RA, Alexis, who ran a parallel study in Mandarin, and suggest that ASL and Mandarin pattern together due to not needing to mark definiteness overtly (as with English "the").
Kate will present some fresh results of an experimental pragmatics project led by last spring's co-op student Chloe Frey (who may be able to join us!) on contrastive inferences for adjectives in both English (with co-speech gesture) and ASL (including classifiers). English results are a replication of earlier contrastive inference work in gesture; extending the question to modifiers in ASL, we find that adjectival modifiers based on classifiers pattern like English adjectives and not English gesture. We will also situate these results in the context of further fresh results from a study by M&M lab summer RA, Alexis, who ran a parallel study in Mandarin, and suggest that ASL and Mandarin pattern together due to not needing to mark definiteness overtly (as with English "the").