[Ltg] HAIL Seminar (28th February): Professor Stephen Crain, Macquarie University

[Andrew Lampert]

                      H.A.I.L. Seminar series
                          CSIRO ICT Centre
                   http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/


Title:          Logic or language: what does "or" mean?

Speaker:        Professor Stephen Crain
                ARC Federation Fellow
                Deputy Director, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science
                Macquarie University

Date:           Tuesday 28th February 2006 at 11am

Location:       CSIRO ICT Centre,
                Building E6B, Macquarie University.

                See <http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/location.htm> for details.


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Abstract

Many facts about language remain hidden from learners, yet every learner figures them out early in the course of language development. Nativists propose that children solve these mysteries by drawing upon a priori knowledge of universal linguistic principles and parameters. One set of mysteries concerns children's emerging knowledge of the interpretation of natural language disjunction (e.g., English "or", Chinese 'huozhe', Japanese 'ka'). Most of the input to children is consistent with an 'exclusive-or' reading of disjunction, according to which a statement of the form A or B is true if A is true, or if B is true, but not if both A and B are true: e.g., Is it red or blue? You can have cake or ice cream. Nevertheless, it reasonable to suppose that the exclusive-or reading is derived by Gricean implicature, and that the basic meaning of disjunction in natural language is the same as in classical logic, namely 'inclusive-or' (such that A or B is true if either A or B is true, and if both A and B are true).

The research question becomes: how do children figure out the basic meaning of disjunction? I propose that children's knowledge that disjunction is inclusive-or comes from universal grammar. If so, then it should be demonstrable that disjunction is inclusive-or in all natural languages, regardless of abundant apparent counter-examples. It should also be demonstrable that young children adopt inclusive-or as the basic meaning of disjunction, across languages, regardless of the input they encounter.

To substantiate the first claim - that inclusive-or is the basic meaning of disjunction in Universal Grammar - I first show that natural languages universally invoke inclusive-or in linguistic contexts where the implicature of exclusivity does not arise and where parametric differences across languages are not operative. These observations are then supplemented by experimental studies demonstrating that children assign the basic inclusive-or meaning to disjunction in several of these contexts, and even in some linguistic contexts in which adult speakers assign the truth conditions associated with exclusive-or.


Short resume

Stephen Crain has a BA in Philosophy (UCLA), a PhD in Psychology (UC Irvine) and
has held positions as professor and chair of two linguistic departments in the
US (Maryland and Connecticut). He is currently an ARC Federation Fellow and
Deputy Director of MACCS. Recently he has been investigating how semantic and
pragmatic principles are acquired, how these principles are used in language
processing, and how they are represented in the human brain/mind.


----------------------------------------
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