Event

Professor Alexis Wellwood from the University of Southern California will be delivering a talk next Friday (11/22) titled: Naturalizing and quantifying events and processes. (Please see below for the abstract!)

Philosophers and linguists have long debated how best to model the distinct referential profiles of nouns like 'water' and 'cup', and an apparently parallel distinction between verbs like 'sleep' and 'jump'. For example, while it is both straightforward and sensical to ask how many cups there are on the table, or how many times an individual jumped, it makes little sense to ask how many waters are in a puddle, or how many sleeps are in a nap. Semantic models of the relevant phenomena reveal an ontological analogy wherein the domains of objects and events are structured in a common, discrete way, and those of stuff and process are structured in a common, continuous way. Importantly, this analogy has concomitant explanatory utility for our understanding of other linguistic phenomena, e.g. how the sense of an underspecified measure term like 'more' is resolved. In this talk, I pursue the metasemantic project of understanding why it is that we observe just the patterns of lexical and compositional meaning that we do in this area. Reporting novel experimental findings that build on prior work on the object/substance distinction in linguistic semantics and cognitive psychology, I demonstrate and explicate how lexical, syntactic, and visual cues can be independently recruited towards resolving the meaning of 'more' in predictable ways relative to the (cognitive) event/process distinction. I argue that such study sheds light on the principles by which our minds organize concepts into classes, and how those concepts may be rapidly tokened by (at least) linguistic and visual cognition in simple tasks.