Research

• Decomposing generics

Growing out of my original interest in stative interpretations, the construction of generics has become a more recent focus for my theoretical work. Adopting a neo-constructionist perspective, this research examines the morphosyntactic units that underlie reference to kinds/subkinds and generalizations over individuals and events, identifying the compositional primitives we use to go beyond our given experience and learn about the world.

• Husband, E.M. (2022). Nothing much for kinds. In Stockall, L., Martí, L., Adger, D., Roy, I. and Ouwayda, S. (eds.) For Hagit: A celebration. QMUL Occasional Papers in Linguistics, no. 47.

• Husband, E. M. (2022). The syntax of generics and the absence of generic articles. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA) 7(1). 5213.

• Husband, E.M. (2019) Generic, kind, and subkind interpretations: Reflections on Brugger (1993), manuscript.

• Husband, E.M. (2017) Concepts, generics, and number. Talk given at the University of East Anglia, October 11th, Norwich, UK.

• Husband, E.M. (2017) NUMBER and asymmetric conceptual connections in genericity. Talk given at The Generic Notebook: Current Approaches to Genericity (Workshop), June 2nd, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin.

• Fuellenbach, K. and Husband, E.M. (2016) Generalizations from definite and indefinite generics are asymmetric. Poster given at the Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.

The Generics Across Languages project, in collaboration with Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Linnaea Stockall, and Suzi Lima and funded by the BA/Leverhulme and the John Fell Fund, is working to broaden our descriptive and typological understanding of generic expressions. The team is developing a Generics Toolkit to elicit a standardized set of generics phenomena that can be used by professional linguists on their own languages or in the field with the aim of deepening our understand of the cross-linguistic variation underlying generic expressions.

• States at the syntax/semantics interface

Taking Verkuyl (1972) as my starting point, I have been arguing that states, like events, are compositional and that the properties that determine the interpretation of states are the same as those that determine the interpretation of events. This view has important consequences for how we think about the domain of individuals and what our base ontological categories look like from a semantic point of view.

• Husband, E.M. (2012) On the Compositional Nature of States. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. John Benjamins.

• Husband, E.M. (2012) Some Structural Analogies between Existential Interpretation and Telicity. The End of Argument Structure?: Syntax and Semantics.

• Husband, E.M. (2012) Stages of Individuals and the Composition of States. The Linguistic Review.

• Husband, E.M. (2010) Compositional States. In N. Li and D.E. Lutz (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 20. 76-90.

• Husband, E.M. (2010) On the Compositional Nature of Stativity. Doctorial Dissertation, Michigan State University.

• Sentence interpretation and memory architectures

Forming dependencies during language comprehension relies on memory retrieval, and such mechanisms are likely to interact with our interpretative mechanisms as well. This research examines how memory mechanisms are used during the construction of sentence interpretations.

• • Hildebrandt, L. A. and Husband, E.M. (2019) Quantifiers, restrictors, and illusory NPI licensing. Poster given at the 32nd CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, Boulder, CO.

  • Chen, S.Y. and Husband, E.M. (2018) Comprehending anaphoric presuppositions requires memory retrieval too. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 3, 44:1-11.

  • Ng, A. and Husband, E.M. (2017) Interference effects across the at-issue/not-at-issue divide: Agreement and NPI licensing. Poster given at the 30th CUNY Humans Sentence Processing Conference, Cambridge, MA.

  • Patson, N.D. and Husband, E.M. (2015) Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69:5, 950-971.

• Predictive mechanisms in language comprehension

The idea that language comprehension employs predictive mechanisms has long been alluring for psycholinguistic theory as a way to address fundamental questions about how language comprehension is possible in the face of a rapid and often noisy linguistic signal. This research investigates the benefits of a successful prediction and consequences for when predictions fail, with a particular focus on structural prediction.

• Husband, E.M. (forthcoming). Prediction in the maze: Probabilistic pre-activation and the English a/an contrast. Glossa Psycholinguistics.

• Bovolenta, G. and Husband, E.M. (2022). Structural prediction during language comprehension revealed by electrophysiology: Evidence from Italian auxiliaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 

• Bovolenta, G. and Husband, E.M. (2020). Prediction failure blocks the use of local semantic context. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience.

• Ito, A. and Husband, E.M. (2017) How robust are effects of semantic and phonological prediction during language comprehension? A visual world eye-tracking study. Proceedings of the Mental Architecture for Processing and Learning of Language. Tokyo, Japan. 

• Husband, E.M. and Gansonre, C. (2014) Direct evidence for structural prediction from the processing of auxiliary dependencies: An ERP investigation in French. Poster given at the 6th annual Society for the Neurobiology of Language conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• VanDyke, J., Husband, E.M., and Ferreria, F. (2011) Inanimacy as a cue to derived subjects: Evidence from the development of the "semantic" P600. Poster given at the 17th Annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference, Paris, France.