Course Description
This course explores the relation between semantics and pragmatics, language variation and change and psycholinguistics, bridging the gap between these sometimes-disconnected linguistic subfields.
We will analyze specific linguistic representations, and explore how their interpretation is impacted by independent cognitive and communicative factors, and how this interaction between linguistic knowledge and domain-general cognition results in systematic patterns of meaning variation and change. The empirical phenomena of the course comprise three well-attested systematic changes in the associations between linguistic forms and functional meanings in the tense-aspect domain: the Copula, the Progressive-to-Imperfective and the Perfect-to-Perfective grammaticalization paths.
During the course, we will address the following questions: What are the properties of meaning change trajectories? What linguistic proposals have been advanced to explain them? What aspects of their systematicity are ascribable to linguistic meaning alone and what to independent cognitive and communicative forces, also hypothesized to be involved in real-time linguistic communication? What predictive value does the understanding of the meaning change-cognition interaction have for our models of language variation, and for our architectures of linguistic knowledge more generally?
Area Tags: Semantics, Pragmatics, Variation, Psycholinguistics, Diachrony, Linguistic Frameworks
(Session 2) Tuesday/Friday 3:00pm -4:20pm
Location: ILC N400
Instructors: Martín Fuchs & Maria Piñango
Martín Fuchs (PhD, Yale Linguistics 2020) is a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University. His research brings together theoretical approaches and corpus and experimental methods to understand semantic variation as a manifestation of larger principles of meaning change. Specifically, he looks at how certain cognitive and communicative pressures that support grammaticalization processes constrain the synchronic variation that we observe across speakers of different dialectal varieties in the way that they interpret the meaning of specific markers.
María M. Piñango is Associate Professor in Yale University’s Department of Linguistics and Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. She investigates the morphosemantic system, its mechanisms of real-time composition, and the conceptual and memory systems that support it, including individual differences. She uses a variety of methodological approaches: from strictly behavioral methods (questionnaires/self-paced reading/eye-tracking) to electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques. Currently, Piñango’s research focuses on the neurocognitively grounded modelling of conceptual structure that support cross-dialectical semantic variation and semantic change dynamics. Piñango directs Yale’s Language and Brain Lab and serves as Associate Editor for Cognitive Science and Language and Computation (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence).
