SemanticsBabble

SemanticsBabble is now Syntax and Semantics Babble (S-Babble)! See the S-Babble webpage for up-to-date information on the group.

About

What

  • A weekly informal discussion group at UC San Diego on theoretical and experimental aspects of semantics and related areas such as its interface with syntax, pragmatics, and philosophy of language

  • Open to any students and faculty

  • Supported by an award from the UC San Diego Institute of Arts and Humanities

How

  • Speakers are asked to prepare a talk that is no longer than 45/50 mins and send a title as early as possible, but at least one week before the talk

  • An abstract of the talk and suggestions for background readings are welcome

  • Speakers are fully free to choose among the following 4 presentation options
    1. Full talk without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
    2. First 30 mins of the talk without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
    3. First 15 mins of the talk without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
    4. The talk can be interrupted with questions any time

When

Tuesday 11 am - 12:30 pm

Where

Zoom (email eclem [at] ucsd [dot] edu to be added to our weekly email list to receive the link)

Who (the organizers)

Emily Clem, Ivano Caponigro, and Jonathan Cohen

Schedule

Spring 2021

  • 4/6: Mary Moroney (Cornell), Carol-Rose Little (McGill), and Justin Royer (McGill) - "Two types of numeral classifiers: Evidence from Shan, Ch'ol and Chuj"

  • 4/13: Discussion of the future of SemanticsBabble

  • 4/20: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia) - "How experimental should we be?" (joint meeting with the Linguistic Fieldwork Working Group)

  • 4/27: John Gluckman (University of Kansas) - "Belief-of-existence and perspectival shift in Nyala East"

  • 5/11: Seoyeon Jang (UCSD Linguistics) - "Which-which question allows what-what?! On the pair-list reading of Korean double-wh echo questions"

  • 5/18: Hüseyin Güngör (Johns Hopkins University) - "Counterfactuals, hyperintensionality and Hurford phenomena"

  • 5/25: Irina Burukina (Eötvös Loránd University) - "Arguments introduced by embedded C"

  • 6/1: Josh Wampler (UCSD Linguistics) - "Takeaways from SALT 31: Highlights from the SALT(ED) workshop, talks, and posters"

Past Quarters

Winter 2021

  • 1/12: Phuong Khuu (UC Berkeley) - "The semantics of reflexive operator 'tự' in Vietnamese"

  • 1/19: Milana Kostic (UCSD Philosophy) - "Learning from Conditionals"

  • 1/26: Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley) - "English non-manner how-clauses as answers to deficient questions"

  • 2/2: Joshua Wampler (UCSD Linguistics) - "What are they doing with that verb? Towards a proper understanding of English main verb do"

  • 2/9: Maura O'Leary (UCLA) - "Three facets of nominal temporal interpretation"

  • 3/2: Emily Clem (UCSD Linguistics) - "Attitude reports and the syntax-semantics interface: The view from Amahuaca"

  • 3/9: Ivano Caponigro (UCSD Linguistics) - "Richard Montague's turn towards natural language"

Fall 2020

  • 10/6: Introductions and organizational meeting

  • 10/20: Ivano Caponigro (UCSD Linguistics) - "Headless relative clauses and the syntax-semantics mapping: Evidence from Mesoamerica"

  • 11/3: Nico Tedeschi (UCSD Linguistics) - "Learning spatial frames of reference in San Juan Piñas Mixtec"

  • 11/10: Ethan Nowak (Umeå University) - "Meta-metasematics: What philosophical arguments about metasemantics are and should be"

  • 11/17: Joshua Wampler (UCSD Linguistics) - "Resolving anaphoric reference to eventualities: Effects of referring expressions and grammatical aspect"

  • 11/24: Sam Elgin (UCSD Political Science) - "Definition: Or, The New Paradox of Analysis"