LingLunch: Jonathan Ginzburg

Jonathan Ginzburg (LLF/UPC): Compositionality and Multimodality (Joint work with Andy Lücking)

Classically compositionality tied the lexicon, syntax, and semantics. The late 20th and early 21st century featured an additional factor---context, which is in fact pivotal in animal communication and child language. Most recently  there have been claims (most recently by Trujillo and Holler, 2024 and by Hömke et al 2025) that the facial and head gestures are an additional factor. In this talk, we consider how to formulate  a multimodal semantics, a task closely related to a semantics for multimodal interaction. This  requires one to address several thorny issues, the most central of which is: when there are multiple channels how many distinct contents arise?