Séminaire des doctorants

Séminaire des doctorants des laboratoires Structures formelles du langage (SFL) et Laboratoire de Linguistique formelle (LLF)

Laboratoire SFL

Doctorant : Mauro Vigano

Titre: Interpreting agrammatism in the light of generative syntax frameworks

Résumé:

The term “aphasia” refers to a cluster of acquired language disorders following brain lesions. The clinical features of aphasia are heterogeneous: the level of language processing impaired and its severity are related to the location and the extent of the brain lesions. Agrammatism is a possible feature of aphasia and is defined by the production of short and simplified sentences with morphemes omissions and deficits in the comprehension of complex sentences. In order to interpret the mechanisms underlying agrammatism, several hypotheses have been proposed. The aim of the project is to investigate different accounts of agrammatism, analysing the comprehension and the production performances of Italian-speaking and French-speaking subjects with aphasia. The notion of sentence complexity will be explored considering the characteristics of the syntactic structure (multiple projections in the syntactic tree, presence of syntactic movement), the canonicity of the constituents’ order, the semantic features of the lexical items and the computational load (in terms of number of phrases/morphemes/phonemes). The study will contribute to a better understanding of agrammatism both from a theoretical and a clinical point of view, providing cross-linguistic evidence for testing different interpretative hypotheses.

Laboratoire LLF

Doctorante : Cécile Larralde

Title: What can discourse connectives teach us about the processing of non-truth-conditional meaning?

Résumé :
A sentence containing two conjuncts combined with but, so or and is true if both of the conjuncts are true. However, but and so, unlike and, contribute to the non-truth-conditional meaning of the sentence by imposing the computation of a pragmatic inference of, respectively, contrast and causality. This property of non-truth-conditional discourse connectives to lexically encode pragmatic meaning has made them a popular subject of theoretical and empirical studies aiming to characterize their meaning and their integration to discourse. Little is known however about their exact inferential profile in isolation of the entertainment of other pragmatic inferences relying on world knowledge or extensive contextual assessment. Improving our understanding of the processing of non-truth-conditional discourse connectives would contribute to characterize general pragmatic processes. My PhD journey will be concerned with establishing a clearer picture of the inferential profile of non-truth-conditional discourse connectives. In this talk I will share reaction time study constituting the first step of my doctoral research.