Course Description
Natural languages provide a rich set of implicit and explicit means for expressing causal relationships (e.g., causative verbs and/or morphology, causal conjunctions and complementizers). The semantics of such causal expressions is indicative of what constitutes our causal knowledge, insofar as observable similarities and differences between causal expressions reflect the types of information to which we attend in cognitive causal reasoning.
This course introduces a framework for modeling causal relationships, and shows that such a framework can be fruitfully translated into a semantic system which captures the factors licensing causal inference and interpretation in natural languages. The underlying assumption of this approach is that our use of causal language reflects the structure and logic of an independent cognitive system for encoding, representing, and reasoning about causation as we perceive it in the world around us.
The two main goals of the course are the following:
- Introduction of a formal representational system for causal dependencies, and of a corresponding semantic framework to define linguistically-relevant relationships. For this purpose, we introduce Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), which provides the tools for a rigorous model-theoretic approach to the semantics of causal expressions;
- Analyzing the differential interpretation of causal expressions, using the formal tools developed in I to develop a principled semantic theory.
Area Tags: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse, Cognitive Science
(Session 1) Monday/Thursday 10:30-11:50
Location: ILC S413
Instructor: Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal & Prerna Nadathur
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal is a Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a visiting professor Yale University. His research interests revolve around different aspects of linguistics, including historical linguistics and semantics. Specific topics that he studies are negation, reciprocal constructions, non-selected datives and causative constructions. His extended research agenda is to encourage dialogue between the intellectual communities of formal semanticists and historical linguistics and to explore the ways in which the tools and findings of each field can bring mutual benefit to each other. He also pursues similar conceptual aims in the interface of philosophy and linguistics, and in this context, he devoted considerable research effort to causation.
Prerna Nadathur is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University. Her research interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics, with a particular focus on causal reasoning and the compositional and inferential consequences of lexically-encoded causal meaning. Her recent work examines the lexical semantics of causative constructions and implicative verbs, as well as the interactions between grammatical and lexical aspect and causal approaches to ability and complex eventuality predicates.
