This coming week, we have our last installment in the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series for the 2024-2025 academic year! The talk will be given by Dr. Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University) on Friday, April 4 at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below.
Title: On the semantic representation of contrast: insights from sign language (and spoken language) anaphora
Abstract: The use of three-dimensional signing space for tracking referents across a discourse is one of the rare ways that sign languages – at least at a surface level – differ from spoken languages, and so has been using to provide insight into many questions about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representation of anaphora in language more generally. In this talk I will consider how anaphoricity in sign languages provides insight into information structural notions, especially givenness, contrast, and definiteness. In particular, I will focus on new empirical arguments that the expression of contrast falls out as a consequence of marking (explicit and implicit) discourse familiarity and non-identity, and discuss what this means for how we should think about the relationship between anaphoricity, alternatives, and information structure in both spoken and signed languages.
Kate is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Kate before the talk next Friday, please email Brandon with your availability by Wednesday so that we can schedule accordingly.