Linguistics seminars

Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. To date, the vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun-noun metaphors of the form An X is a Y (e.g., My job is a jail). Yet there is evidence that verb metaphor (e.g., I sailed through my exams) is more common. Despite this, comparatively little work has examined how verb metaphors are processed. In this talk, I will propose a novel account for verb metaphor comprehension: verb metaphors are understood in the same way that analogies are—as comparisons processed via structure-mapping. I will discuss the predictions that arise from applying the analogical framework to verb metaphor and present a series of experiments showing that verb metaphoric extension is consistent with those predictions.

Learning verbs is difficult and critical to learning one's native language. Children appear to benefit from seeing multiple events and comparing them to each other, and structural alignment theory provides a good theoretical framework to guide research into how preschool children may be comparing events as they learn new verbs. The talk will include 6 studies of early verb learning that make use of eye-tracking procedures as well as other behavioral (pointing) procedures, and that test key predictions from SA theory including the prediction that seeing similar examples before more varied examples helps observers learn how to compare (progressive alignment) and the prediction that when events have very low alignability with other events, that is one cue that the events should be ignored. Whether or how statistical learning may also be at work will be considered.

Children need inference in order to learn the meanings of words. They must infer the referent from the situation in which a target word is said. Furthermore, to be able to use the word in other situations, they also need to infer what other referents the word can be generalized to. As verbs refer to relations between arguments, verb learning requires relational analogical inference, something which is challenging to young children. To overcome this difficulty, young children recruit a diverse range of cues in their inference of verb meanings, including, but not limited to, syntactic cues and social and pragmatic cues as well as statistical cues. They also utilize perceptual similarity (object similarity) in progressive alignment to extract relational verb meanings and further to gain insights about relational verb meanings. However, just having a list of these cues is not useful: the cues must be selected, combined, and coordinated to produce the optimal interpretation in a particular context. This process involves abductive reasoning, similar to what scientists do to form hypotheses from a range of facts or evidence. In this talk, I discuss how children use a chain of inferences to learn meanings of verbs. I consider not only the process of analogical mapping and progressive alignment, but also how children use abductive inference to find the source of analogy and gain insights into the general principles underlying verb learning. I also present recent findings from my laboratory that show that prelinguistic human infants use a rudimentary form of abductive reasoning, which enables the first step of word learning.

Over the past 50 years, sociolinguistic studies on black Americans have expanded in both theoretical and technical scope, and newer research has moved beyond seeing speakers, especially black speakers, as a monolithic sociolinguistic community (Wolfram 2007, Blake 2014). Yet there remains a dearth of critical work on complex identities existing within black American communities as well as how these identities are reflected and perceived in linguistic practice. At the same time, linguists have begun to take greater interest in the ways in which public figures, such as politicians, may illuminate the wider social meaning of specific linguistic variables. In this talk, I will present results from analyses of multiple aspects of ethnolinguistic variation in the speech of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2019-2020 Democratic Party Primary debates. Together, these results show how VP Harris expertly employs both enregistered and subtle linguistic variables, including aspects of African American Language morphosyntax, vowels, and intonational phonology in the construction and performance of a highly specific sociolinguistic identity that reflects her unique positions politically, socially, and racially. The results of this study expand our knowledge about how the complexities of speaker identity are reflected in sociolinguistic variation, as well as press on the boundaries of what we know about how speakers in the public sphere use variation to reflect both who they are and who we want them to be.

Analogies, broadly defined, map novel concepts onto familiar concepts, making them essential for perception, reasoning, and communication. We argue that analogy-building served a critical role in the evolution of cumulative culture, by allowing humans to learn and transmit complex behavioural sequences that would otherwise be too cognitively demanding or opaque to acquire. The emergence of a protolanguage consisting of simple labels would have provided early humans with the cognitive tools to build explicit analogies and to communicate them to others. This focus on analogy-building can shed new light on the coevolution of cognition and culture, and addresses recent calls for better integration of the field of cultural evolution with cognitive science. This talk will address what cumulative cultural evolution is, how we define analogy-building, how analogy-building applies to cumulative cultural evolution, how analogy-building fits into language evolution, and the implications of analogy-building for causal understanding and cognitive evolution.