Lexical Matters

Lexical Matters is a class given by Olivier Bonami and dedicated to discussing the state of the art in morphology and related fields, including lexical semantics, as well as computational and psycholinguistic work on morphology and the lexicon. Most sessions will be devoted to presenting a recent piece of research, either published or in progress. Exact topics will be decided on the basis of the individual interests of the students.

The class has a double audience: doctoral students at ED622, and motivated M2 students with a strong background in morphology (e.g. those who successfully tool advanced morphology in their first year).

Participants are intended to proactively contribute to the class by reading the materials in advance, participating in discussions, and volunteering to make presentations. For those master students who are officially enrolled in the class and need a grade, evaluation will be based on a combination of oral presentation(s) and a final written report. Work can be carried out in groups of up to 3 students. The content of the work can consist either of a research project or of reporting on research by others.

Sessions take place on Wednesdays 15:30-17:30 from September 25, 2024, in room 533, Olympe de Gouges.

Documents can be downloaded here by registered participants. Please write to Olivier Bonami to get the password.

Participants please fill in this form by September 29.

2024-2025 Program:

• September 25: Introduction do grammatical gender (Olivier)
• October 2: A computational approach to gender assignment in French (Olivier)
  • Slides from 2019 presentation
• October 9
  • More on gender assignment (Olivier)
    • Shafiabadi, Nusbaumer & Bonami (2024) on the causal role of morphology in form-based prediction
    • Taking semantics into account: a premilinary study + report on a study of German
  • The interaction of gender and derivational morphology in the interpretation of agent nouns in French:
    • Computational study by Wauquier and Bonami (Olivier)
• October 16
  • More on the interaction of gender and derivational morphology in the interpretation of agent nouns in French:
    • Follow-up experimental study by Kious and Fargues (Emma)
  • The social impact of grammatical gender in a crosslinguistic perspective:
    • Report on two papers by psychologists and economists (Olivier)
    • Follow-up study (Marc; slides in shard folder)
• October 23: Marie Flesch on corpus studies of gender inclusive language in French (slides in shared folder)
• October 30: break
• November 6: Olivier on experimental evidence for the effects of grammatical gender
• November 13: 
  • Amanda and Hanna on grammatical gender loss in Norwegian
  • Emma on inclusive language in the context of -iel in French
• November 20:
  • Olivia
  • Lion
• November 27:
  • Amandine
• December 4:
  • Zeinab
• December 12:
  • Hannah
  • Diana