| main interests | current research | past research |
The primary focus of my research is the composition, representation, and processing of meaning in natural language.
My past research has dealt mainly with the first two aspects (composition and representation). In particular, the focus of my investigation has been the interpretation of nominal constituents, both in relation to their structural properties and in relation to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic context in which they appear. It is my intention to continue investigating in my future research the interaction between the contribution of these two sources of information – lexical and structural information and contextual information – to the interpretation of natural language both within and beyond the realm of nominals.
In my current research I am addressing in a more comprehensive way the third aspect (processing) as well, using experimental psycholinguistic methodologies (eye-tracking in particular) to probe the way in which speakers compute (and use) meaning in natural language. In addition, I am interested in other issues concerning the psychological correlates of linguistic knowledge – among others, competing models of language processing, and the acquisition/development of linguistic knowledge – interests that I intend to pursue further in my future research.
At a more abstract level, I am interested in the overall shape of linguistic theory and in questions concerning the structure of the formal system, its learnability properties, and the inventory of formal tools needed to analyze and account for the semantic properties of natural language on a crosslinguistic basis.
At present, I am working on three projects: two are mainly theoretical, while the third is (at the moment) mainly experimental in nature.
The first project concerns the syntax/semantics of partitive constructions. I am investigating the hypothesis that partitives are "simple" quantificational constructions in which a quantifier combines with a predicate-denoting expression. This hypothesis is in direct contrast with the commonly assumed view that partitives have a "recursive" structure in which a nominal constituent is embedded within another nominal constituent. But it immediately accounts for a fact that is quite mysterious within the alternative analysis: the impossibility of spelling out the higher noun in the complex structure of partitives.
From a semantic point of view there seems to be nothing wrong with DPs like *two dogs of those animals: if a partitive DP denotes a proper part of the entity denoted by the embedded DP (Barker, 1998), it is not clear why the partitive DP given as an example cannot be used to describe two entities in the relevant set of animals which happen to be dogs. The classic analysis has to adopt ad-hoc assumptions to impose the condition that the noun in the "external" DP must always be unpronounced. It would be interesting then to investigate the properties of partitives departing from the assumption that they are simple quantificational constructions that make overt reference to a contextually-restricted domain of quantification via the resource-domain indicator the (Westerstahl, 1984), and try to derive the well-known properties of these constructions (restrictions on the choice of the higher quantifier and on the definiteness of the embedded DP) in terms of this approach. This different approach would furthermore allow for a more enlightening comparison between partitives and constructions – like the English "out of construction" – that are often assimilated to partitives but seem to display quite different properties (e.g. see the contrast between *two dogs of John's pets and *dogs out of John's pets).
The second project (carried on in collaboration with Prof. Carlson) is concerned with words – like danger or clue – whose interpretation is intuitively very much dependent on their context of use. As pointed out e.g. by Stanley (2002), context dependence presents a challenge for compositional semantics: the observation that non-linguistic factors seem to play a pervasive role in the determination of meaning casts doubt on the attempt of preserving any sort of systematicity in the theory of linguistic meaning. A well-known response to this problem is the attempt to reduce all truth-conditional effects of extralinguistic context to a linguistic "trigger", by postulating the presence of an "open slot" – an implicit variable whose value must be provided by the context – in the linguistic representation of the sentence/expression that displays context dependence.
We believe that the implicit variable approach raises many issues that are often left unaddressed by its proponents, and that for this reason it is a questionable strategy to account for context dependence of meaning in general. And, in particular, we do not believe that such a strategy can offer a proper account of the context dependence of the interpretation of words like danger and clue. We are thus trying to develop an alternative analysis of the interpretation of these words, which may eventually generalize to account for other cases of context dependence of meaning.
The third project that I am currently working on (in collaboration with Prof. Tanenhaus and Prof. Carlson) is an experimental investigation of the hypothesis that the information contributed by scalar implicatures is available to speakers very locally with respect to their triggers (a scalar term), and that this information can lead the further processing of a sentence. In particular, I am currently running eye-tracking experiments – adopting the "visual world" methodology pioneered by Tanenhaus and his collaborators – aimed at testing the hypothesis that the exclusive interpretation of or in a sentence like The bananas or the grapes are next to some donkeys is calculated and integrated before the whole sentence has been heard, and that this information can lead to early disambiguation effects in the identification of the intended target for an action. Initial evidence – presented recently at Sinn und Bedeutung 9 and WECOL 2004 – seems to support our experimental hypothesis. (Further results will be presented at the 2005 LSA Annual Meeting in Oakland in January.)
This third project aims at characterizing the timecourse of the processing of scalar implicatures, in order to provide experimental grounding for a theory of the calculation of scalar implicatures. It should be pointed out, however, that I do not expect evidence from language processing to determine directly whether a given theory of scalar implicatures is correct. The same theoretical stance with respect to scalar implicatures can lead to very different empirical predictions, given different assumptions concerning the nature of language processing in general, and empirical facts concerning the processing of scalar implicatures can lend themselves to being accommodated in some specific instantiation of a general theoretical approach to this type of meaning. Still, I take it that evidence from language processing can determine (at least) minimal adequacy conditions against which specific instances of a given theory of scalar implicatures can be tested.
My dissertation deals with the syntax and semantics of possessive constructions. I investigate the nature and the distribution of the different interpretations licensed by these constructions, with a particular focus on possessive noun phrases and on how their structural and quantificational properties and their status with respect to the definite/indefinite distinction interact with their interpretation.
Contrary to what has been claimed by some authors, the interpretation of possessives is not vague. I show that it is not true that "a possessive NP may bear any relation whatever to the head noun" (Williams, 1981) and I argue that the various interpretations that can be licensed by Saxon Genitive noun phrases (e.g. John's car) in English should be accounted for in terms of, at least, two different syntactic/semantic structures. Both structures can determine interpretations that display a certain degree of dependence from the context, but the role played by context is very different in the two cases.
On the one hand, the relation between a genitive noun phrase and its head noun can be lexically encoded in the semantic composition by a constant. This constant is interpreted as denoting a relation of "control". Possession proper is an instance of this control relation, but I propose that the actual interpretation of this relation in a possessive noun phrase can be further specified as a pragmatic inference based on the context of use of the possessive.
On the other hand, the relation between a genitive noun phrase and its head noun can be encoded in the semantic composition by a variable. The interpretation of this variable is entirely context-dependent, and can range on relations which are not characterizable as control relations as well. However contextual specification of the value of this variable is not possible in all types of possessive constructions. I argue that the possibility of contextually specifying the value of this variable is dependent on (discourse-)semantic properties associated with the use of the definite article. This explains why interpretations of this second type are licensed only by noun phrases where the possessive description is embedded under the definite article (definites and partitives), a fact that I first pointed out in a paper delivered at the 36th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society in 2000.
During my graduate career I worked on other topics that are not within the immediate focus of my dissertation, some of which are reported below. (i) Quantification in natural language: scopal properties of different types of quantifiers, plurals and distributivity. (ii) (In)definites: effects of the definite/indefinite distinction, the interpretation of weak indefinites, the interpretation of partitives. (iii) Discourse structuring: questions, informational focus, and their interaction in discourse. (iv) Syntactic vs. semantic licensing and predication: the argument-modifier distinction, nominalizations, syntactic encoding of restrictive vs. appositive modification, copular constructions. (v) Psycholinguistics: role of semantic/pragmatic information in parsing, acquisition of semantic/pragmatic knowledge.
Last update: November 11, 2005