Formal Models in the Study of Language ― 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.

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 experimental investigations 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 Neuchatel, Switzerland. She is the author of the monograph entitled ’Temporal Reference: New Empirical Perspectives’ (due to be published in 2017 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). She has previously been affiliated with the Linguistics Department of the University of Geneva, the Institute for Cognitive Science of the University of Lyon, and the Laboratory for Autism and Developmental Disorders of the University of Tours.

Christopher Laenzlinger is Associate Professor at the department of linguistics and IUFE (University Institute of Teacher Training) at the University of Geneva. He got his Ph.D. degree in 1996 in General Linguistics and published his dissertation with John Benjamins in 1998 for which he was awarded the prize Charles Bally. He is the author of four books and more than forty articles in various domains such as Romance and Germanic comparative syntax, theoretical and computational linguistics and the didactics of grammar and lexicon. His fields of teaching are the lexicon and morphology, theoretical syntax, French syntax and the didactics of French. He has been the principal investigator of several research projects in Natural Language Processing and Generative Grammar. He has also collaborated in various teaching and research programs with researchers and universities from various countries, such as Australia, Canada, France, Italy, etc.