About
58
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Introduction
My main interest is in language and cognition, in particular the psycholinguistics of semantics and pragmatics, and the cognitive basis of semantic and pragmatic concepts. My research stresses empirical approaches to evaluating the basis of formal semantic distinctions, concentrating on empirical work with large corpora, converged with experimental approaches, including surveys of acceptability judgments, and imaging techniques, to test implications of my research in collaboration with experts.
Additional affiliations
September 2013 - present
Position
- Professor (Associate)
Description
- Introduction to semantics (scheduled) Corpus research Psychosemantics Language and Brain Linguistic concepts: Gradability in Adjectives and Nouns Academic reading and writing for linguistics Supervision of Master and PhD theses
September 2012 - September 2013
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- Meaning and Context Co-teaching Semantic Evidence Adjectives, Vagueness and Gradability - Linguistic, cognitive and philosophical aspects Co-Supervision of two Master theses.
March 2012 - February 2013
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- A post-doctoral scholarship, Language, Logic, and Cognition Center (LLCC), supervised by Edit Doron and Danny Fox
Education
September 2001 - September 2007
September 1996 - September 2001
September 1992 - September 1995
Publications
Publications (58)
In this chapter we present an overview of three main issues that have surrounded the study of gradable properties—vagueness, measurement, and dimensionality—and how they have been pursued from the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. We then provide a brief summary of each chapter in the volume, together with a guide to how the...
Previous studies have identified that conceptual categories corresponding to nouns exhibit semantic domain effects: (1) classification into biological ones reflects a non-additive consideration of their defining dimensions whereas classification into artefactual and, presumably, social nouns is based on an additive one (2) nominal biological concep...
This volume is the first to focus specifically on experimental studies of the semantics of gradability, scale structure and vagueness. It presents support for and challenges to current formal analyses of these phenomena in view of experimentally collected data, highlighting the ways semantic and pragmatic theory can benefit from experimental method...
Existing formal theories represent the interpretations of gradable predicates in terms of single scalar dimensions. This paper presents a new approach, which aims to cover morphological gradability in multidimensional adjectives and nouns. Following psychological theories, nouns are assumed to be associated with dimension sets, like adjectives. Deg...
This paper presents an experimental study of multidimensional gradability across categories. The study tests whether and to what extent the naturalness of multidimensional adjectives and nouns in degree constructions is predictable from their conceptual-semantic properties – the way their dimensions are typically bound to create a unified interpret...
There are two fundamentally different kinds of comparison: difference comparisons and contrast comparisons. Unlike adjective phrases, noun phrases can occur in contrast comparisons (such as This bird is more a duck than a goose), but not in difference comparisons (#This bird is more a duck than that one is), where the mediation of a partitive parti...
Questions and their answers have been discussed in length over the past few years. In this
paper we present and analyze a Hebrew hedger, be-gadol , roughly translated as basically. We use the
literature on questions, answers and the relation between them to suggest that be-gadol is an item
which conveys a restriction on the context of utterance....
Existing formal theories represent the interpretations of gradable predicates in terms of single scalar dimensions. This paper presents an extensive experimental study that aims to test a formal semantic account formulated within the framework of the degree approach, which aims to cover morphological gradability in multidimensional adjectives and n...
The degree approach is one of the leading frameworks for the analysis of gradability in language, providing fully compositional accounts for constructions with gradable predicates of different categories. However, in this framework, the interpretation of a gradable predicate is almost always modeled in terms of a single scalar dimension (degree rel...
Adjectives are typically felicitous in within-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than y’, as in This is bigger than that, but are often infelicitous in between-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than (y is) B’, as in *Tweety is bigger than (it is) heavy. Nouns, by contrast, exhibit the inverse pat...
This paper focuses on the meaning of degree modifiers such as slightly and completely, when they are either more prosodically prominent than the scalar adjective they modify or less so. Thus, one challenge is to explain the meaning, function and distribution of these modifiers. A second challenge is to explain the way accentuation (prosodic promine...
This paper investigates core semantic properties that distinguish between different types of gradable adjectives and the effect of context on their interpretation. We contend that all gradable adjectives are interpreted relative to a comparison class (van Rooij to appear), and that it is the nature of the comparison class that constitutes the main...
This paper argues that combinations of gradable adjectives with for phrases are more interesting than they are normally considered to be. Important ingredients of the semantics of for phrases were largely neglected so far. These ingredients point against the popular analyses of for phrases. This paper defends an analysis of for phrases as modifiers...
This is a considerably extended version of the chapter "Vagueness" in Maria Aloni and Paul Dekker (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantic, Cambridge.
MA Thesis (2001), Supervisor: Prof. Fred Landman, Tel Aviv University
A compositional analysis of a range of readings of comparison constructions, as well as the positive form is proposed, which, unlike previous accounts, is compatible with multidimensional adjectives and has the power to explain differences between them and nouns. To this end, adjectives are represented as properties of dimensional quantifiers, name...
This book presents a study of the connections between vagueness and gradability, and their different manifestations in adjectives (morphological gradability effects) and nouns (typicality effects). It addresses two opposing theoretical approaches from within formal semantics and cognitive psychology.
This article presents corpus-based evidence for a typology of multidimensional adjectives, such as healthy and sick. The interpretation of these adjectives is sensitive to multiple dimensions, such as blood pressure, cholesterol and blood-sugar
level. The study investigated the frequency of exception phrases that appear to operate on an implicit un...
Invited Speakers.- Empirical Evidence for Embodied Semantics.- Natural Color Categories Are Convex Sets.- Concealed Questions with Quantifiers.- Specific, Yet Opaque.- Workshop on Implicature and Grammar.- Affective Demonstratives and the Division of Pragmatic Labor.- Experimental Detection of Embedded Implicatures.- Local and Global Implicatures i...
Adjectives often associate with multiple dimensions (for example, healthy and sick may be ordered by blood pressure, pulse, sugar, cancer, etc.) So are nouns (for example, birds are characterized as small, feathered, flying, etc.) This paper presents empirical support to a typology of multidimensional predicates based on differences in the role of...
This paper uses Esperanto—a constructed language with transparent morphology but rich semantic-pragmatic components—to study antonymy and polarity. We investigate the distribution of the Esperanto antonymy morpheme ‘mal-’ (as in, for instance, ‘mal-alta’: antonym-tall, short) in a 4.3 million-word corpus, Tekstaro, and use it as an empirical basis...
Classification of entities into categories can be determined based on a rule - a single criterion or relatively few criteria combined with logical operations like `and' or `or'. Alternatively, classification can be based on similarity to prototypical examples, i.e. an overall degree of match to prototypical values on multiple dimensions. Two cognit...
This paper argues that modeling granularity and approximation (Krifka 2007; Lewis 1979) is crucial for capturing important aspects of the distribution and interpretation of adjectives and their modifiers, modulo certain differences between modified adjectives and numerals. In addition, the paper presents supporting experimental results with minimiz...
As part of the common practice of experimental research in cognitive psychology, objects are systematically represented by clusters of property values. Individuals correspond to points in an n-dimensional space, for some number n, where each dimension (axis) is some scalar property. For example, the set of possible individuals presented as stimuli...
This paper provides an analysis of statements with predicates of personal taste (tasty, fun, etc.) Rather than directly relativizing semantic interpretation to a judge (cf., Lasersohn, 2005), this paper aims to capture
the phenomenon called ‘faultless disagreement’ (the fact that one can deny a speaker’s subjective utterance without challenging
the...
This paper provides a new account of positive versus negative antonyms. The data includes well-known linguistic generalizations
regarding negative adjectives, such as their incompatibility with measure phrases (cf. two meters tall/ *short) and ratio phrases (twice as tall/ #short) as well as the impossibility of truly crosspolar comparisons (*Dan i...
This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names (like pound and meter) and gradable adjectives (like tall, short and happy), inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al. In Foundations of measurement: Additive and Polynomial Representations, 1971).
Based on measurement theory’s four-way typology of measures, I claim that different adje...
This paper investigates core semantic properties that distinguish between different types of gradable adjectives and the effect of context on their interpretation. We contend that all gradable adjectives are interpreted relative to a comparison class (van Rooij 2011), and that it is the nature of the comparison class that constitutes the main seman...
This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names and gradable adjectives, inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al 1971). Based on measurement theory's typology of measures, I claim that different predicates are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted...
In model-theoretic semantics, we represent the core of predicate meaning by intension. Another notion, clusters of characteristic properties ('dimensions'), serving as conceptual guidelines that help us identify the denotation in each context of use, has intrigued scholars from a variety of disciplines for years. Typical examples are the prototype...
This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names and gradable adjectives, inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al 1971). Based on measurement theory's typology of measures, I claim that different predicates are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted...
What should an adequate representation of individuals (elements of the domain of discourse) be like, within vagueness models with degrees? This paper explores the hypothesis that individuals are distinguished by their property values, i.e. the extents to which they satisfy gradable properties. First, as Lewis (1986) argues, cross-world identity is...
Typicality is extensively investigated in a variety of disciplines (Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, AI, etc.) However, despite the wide range of evidence for the existence of typicality effects, it is still not clear what the correct account for them is and how they relate to predicate meaning. I will present here Partee & Kamp's 1995 influent...
Projects
Projects (2)
Understanding the role of dimensions not only in categorization under different types of nouns and adjectives, but also in the compositional semantics of constructions with those predicate types, especially gradable constructions with nouns and adjectives.
The project involves judgments and processing studies of dimensions and gradability in English, Hebrew and German, and corresponding ERP and acquisition studies in collaboration with Petra Schumacher, David Anaki, Natalia Meir, and Julie Fadlon.
