LingLunch: Jonathan Ginzburg (LLF/ Université Paris Cité)

Title: Swann's name  and who did the dog chase: Towards a dialogical, brain-oriented semantics (Jonathan Ginzburg, joint work with: Andy Lücking, Robin Cooper, Chris Eliasmith, Staffan Larsson)

One of the important debates in linguistics in general and semantics in particular over the years concerns levels---how many and describing what. In modern era semantics there was a long debate between views which link language and the world directly and those that insist on an extra representational level. In this talk I will argue for and exemplify a semantics grounded in  perception and memory structures in the brain, rather than simply positing various abstract structures representing context, as has largely been the case so far. I will argue that such a brain-based perspective is crucial for dealing with a wide range of basic semantic and pragmatic notions, including
• Presupposition
• Answering questions
• Proper names
• Discourse Topic