The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 26, 2:30pm in the Humanities Institute (Babbidge Libarary, 4th floor), will feature Adrian Brasoveanu (UC Santa Cruz).

Computational Cognitive Modeling for Syntax and Semantics

(joint work with Jakub Dotlačil)

Abstract: I introduce a typical experimental task in psycholinguistics — self-paced reading — and show how to build end-to-end simulations of a human participant in such an experiment; end-to-end means that we model visual and motor processes together with specifically linguistic processes (syntactic and semantic parsing) in a complete model of the experimental task. The model embeds theoretical hypotheses about linguistic representations and parsing processes in an independently motivated cognitive architecture (ACT-R). In turn, the resulting cognitive models can be embedded in Bayesian models to fit them to experimental data, estimate their parameters and perform quantitative model comparison for qualitative theories.

Stefan Kaufmann will be teaching at a one-week summer school on conditionals in Paris, France, June 3-7. The faculty there will be a mix of philosophers and linguists (well, one linguist…):

Dorothy Edgington
Igor Douven
Stefan Kaufmann
John Mackay
David Over

There will also be a concurrent workshop, run by Karen Lewis.

Here is a link to the website with more information.

People interested in conditionals from a linguistic, philosophical or psychological perspective should consider attending this. The deadline for early-bird registration is April 30. There is a registration fee, but I hear that that is somewhat flexible, so sticker shock should not deter you. Get in touch with me and/or the organizers if you have questions.

The Meaning Group will meet on Friday, April 12, 2019, in 338 Oak Hall. We will have an outside speaker, Naomi Francis (MIT). The title of her talk is Imperatives as weak modals: Evidence from even and any. Abstract below.

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The Logic Group Colloquium on Friday, April 12, 2019, 2:30pm in the Humanities Institute (Babbidge Libarary, 4th floor), will feature Branden Fitelson (Northeastern University).

How to model the probabilities of conditionals

David Lewis (and others) have famously argued against Adams’s Thesis (that the probability of a conditional is the conditional probability of its consequent, given it antecedent) by proving various “triviality results.” In this paper, I argue for two theses — one negative and one positive. The negative thesis is that the “triviality results” do not support the rejection of Adams’s Thesis, because Lewisian “triviality based” arguments against Adams’s Thesis rest on an implausibly strong understanding of what it takes for some credal constraint to be a rational requirement (an understanding which Lewis himself later abandoned in other contexts). The positive thesis is that there is a simple (and plausible) way of modeling the probabilities of conditionals, which (a) obeys Adams’s Thesis, and (b) avoids all of the existing triviality results.

The UConn Logic Group workshop “If” by any other name will take place on April 6/7 (Sat/Sun) in Oak Hall 112. Details about the program can be found here.

The Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, April 5, 4:00 in Oak Hall 112, will feature Valentine Hacquard (Linguistics Maryland).

What to learn in learning attitude and modal meanings

Abstract: This talk explores the acquisition of modal and attitude verbs. These words do not name concrete objects, and their uses do not have reliable physical correlates. Consequently their acquisition may rely heavily on cues from the linguistic context. Reporting on three case studies, I will discuss what experience children have with these words, what the learnability problems arise for each, and how children might succeed. We will see what syntactic and pragmatic cues to meaning are (and are not) found in this input, and what capacities children would need to detect and make use of them.