Benjamin Spector

Research

Teaching and Research Seminars

I am a linguist and cognitive scientist, working primarily on meaning in natural languages.

The main goal of my research is to build explicit models of natural language interpretation, with a particular focus on the interactions between compositional aspects of linguistic meaning (those aspects of meaning that derive from the conventional linguistic meaning of words and morphemes and the way they are combined) and non-compositional aspects, which are largely a matter of pragmatics, i.e. inferences we draw about speakers' intentions. In other words, a central goal of my work is to understand the respective roles of structural linguistic factors (logical and grammatical) and of general reasoning and conversational rationality in explaining how we interpret language, and use it to reason and communicate information. My work is therefore concerned with the syntax-semantics interface, semantics proper, and pragmatics. For the most part, the linguistic data that form the empirical basis of my work come from French and English. I combine methods from linguistic analysis, formal logic, probabilistic models of pragmatics and reasoning, and experimental psychology. My work on natural language semantics and pragmatics also connects to classical issues in philosophy of language.

The empirical domains I have investigated include: scalar implicatures and exhaustivity inferences, presuppositions, the meaning of interrogative sentences, the semantics and pragmatics of plural expressions, numbers and quantification, the interactions between different types of pragmatic inferences, semantic indeterminacy (gradable predicates, vagueness, non-maximal readings), polarity sensitivity. I approach all of these areas from both a theoretical/formal and an experimental perspective. In the most recent period, I have explored probabilistic models of pragmatics, which are inspired by decision theory and game theory, and I am also interested in explaining some aspects of semantic typology (universal tendencies regarding how different meanings are expressed across languages) in terms of communicative efficiency. Outside of my core domains of expertise, I have made limited incursions into philosophical logic and computational linguistics.