Formal Models in the Study of Language, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017 Applications in Interdisciplinary Contexts

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler?s diverse and visionary research over the years.  The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

Introduction.- Part I: Linguistic Models.- A Feature-based Account of Weak Islands By Christopher Laenzlinger & Gabriela Soare.- On the Syntax and Pragmatics of some Clause-peripheral Positions By Luigi Rizzi & Adriana Belletti.- Two Challenges for  ‘neo-saussurean’ Approaches to Morphosyntax By Frederick Newmeyer.- Some Notes on Floating Quantifiers By Genoveva Puskas.- A Pragmatic and Philosophical Examination of Everett's claims about Pirahã By Anne Reboul.- A Perspective-based Account of the Imperfective Paradox By Gaetano Fiorin & Denis Delfitto.- Spatial Deictic Expressions in Serbian ovde, tamo, tu; a new Approach By Tijana Asic.- The Singular Square: Contrariety and Double Negation from Aristotle to Homer By Laurence Horn.- Connectives: Order, Causality and Beyond By Joanna Blochowiak.- Part II: Cognitive Models.- Irony, Hyperbole, Jokes and Banter By Deirdre Wilson.- Context Selection in Relevance Theory By Stavros Assimakopoulos.- Sequential Structure ofDiscourse Segments Shaped by the Interplay of Recipient Design or Salience By Istvan Kecskes.- She said you said I saw it with my own eyes: A Pragmatic Account of Commitment By Kira Boulat & Didier Maillat.- Why French Modal verbs are not Polysemous, and other Considerations on Conceptual and Procedural Meanings By Louis de Saussure.- Building and Interpreting ad hoc Categories: A Linguistic Analysis By Caterina Mauri.- Grammar and Theory of mind in Autism By Stéphanie Durrleman.- The Place of Human Language in the Animal World By Stephen R. Anderson.- Part III: Computational Models.- Temporal Coherence in Discourse: Theory and Application for Machine Translation By Cristina Grisot.- Discourse Connectives: Theoretical Models and Empirical Validations in Humans and Computers By Sandrine Zufferey & Andrei Popescu-Belis.- The Interface between Semantics and Discourse Functions: Exploring the Adjective Possibile in a Corpus of Italian Financial news By Andrea Rocci & Elena Musi.- ‘What is pretty cannot be beautiful?’ A Corpus-based Analysis of Aesthetics of Nature By Jesus Romero-Trillo & Violeta Fuentes.- When English meets French. A case study in Comparative Diachronic Syntax By Eric Haeberli.- Some Recent Results on Cross-linguistic, Corpus-based Quantitative Modelling of Word Order and Aspect By Paola Merlo.- Parsing Language-Specific Constructions: The case of French Pronominal Clitics By Eric Wehrli.

Joanna Blochowiak graduated in French Linguistics and also obtained a Master degree in the Philosophy of Language from the University of Geneva. In her PhD dissertation she provided a semantic and pragmatic analysis of ‘why’ questions and of answers with the connective ‘because’. Now she is working as a Postdoc on a project on logical words and her research currently focuses on logical and temporal connectives, negation and causality from formal semantics, pragmatics and experimental perspectives. In the near future, she will be working on conditionals and generics.

Cristina Grisot is working in corpus-based contrastive linguistics and experimental pragmatics. She carried out her doctoral research on the expression of temporal reference in English and Romance languages (French, Italian and Romanian) and she aims at extending this research to aspect-prominent and tenseless languages. She is currently working on offline and online experimentalinvestigations of the cognitive processing of verbal tenses, temporal connectives, temporal adverbials, grammatical aspect, subjectivity and negation, as well as their rich inter-relations. She is now teaching and carrying post-doctoral research at University of Geneva and the Centre of Cognitive Science in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She is the author of the monograph entitled ’Temporal Reference: New Empirical Perspectives’ (due to be published in 2018 by Springer).

Stephanie Durrleman is Senior Researcher at the Psycholinguistics Department of the University of Geneva. Her work spans a variety of topics including language acquisition, creolistics, syntactic cartography, syntactic locality, the grammar-cognition interface, as well as the phenotype of language disorders. These studies often explore linguistic theories with empirical investigations, and strive to yield concrete applications (fine-tuning language policies, developing therapeutic interventions