The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Kathryn Davidson, Professor at Harvard University.  Dr. Davidson will speak on "What’s in a word (but not a picture): Insights from signed languages".

Recent trends in both formal semantics and in cognitive science have taken the logical/compositional structure of meaning in language to be a model for understanding meaning outside language, as in pictures, gestures, etc. Sign languages are an ideal place to investigate this question, since both complex linguistic structure and complex depictive structure are highly productive with the same articulators/same modality and both are used extensively in signing contexts. We might then expect to see unconstrained semantic composition of linguistic and non-linguistic components in sign languages when freed from the articulatory distinction spoken languages face with their accompanying gestures. However, I’ll argue that instead sign languages provide especially strong evidence in favor of distinguishing linguistic and non-linguistic meaning, given the highly constrained ways that non-linguistic meanings compose with complex linguistic structures, based on three case studies: negation, quantification, and anaphora.

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.