Quantity in Language and Thought

We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a workshop entitled Quantity in Language and Thought at ESSLLI 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria.  For more information, see below or contact Shane Steinert-Threlkeld and Jakub Szymanik.

Keynote Speakers

Schedule

Monday, 13 August
  • 17:00 – 18:00: Keynote: Jakub Dotlačil (Amsterdam), How the monotonicity of quantifiers affects on-line pronoun resolution
  • 18:00 – 18:30: Yulia Zinova and Laura Kallmeyer (Düsseldorf), Quantifying events: Frame-based account for time adverbials
Tuesday, 14 August
  • 17:00 – 18:00: Keynote: Elizabeth Coppock (Boston), Typological and experimental evidence for a refined view on proportional ‘most’
  • 18:00 – 18:30: Alexandra Simonenko (Ghent) and Anne Carlier (Lille), Ban on determiner co-occurrence as a case of No Vacuous Quantification: evidence from language change
Wednesday, 15 August
  • 17:00 – 17:30: Samuel Cheyette and Steven Piantadosi (Rochester), Adults vary in their representation of approximate number
  • 17:30 – 18:00: Tin Perkov (Zagreb), Logicality of Generalized Quantifiers
  • 18:00 – 18:30: Elizabeth Coppock and Elias Ganem (Boston), Most vs. more than half vs. the majority
Thursday, 16 August
  • 17:00 – 18:00: Keynote: Steven Piantadosi (Rochester), What lies beneath the language of thought
  • 18:00 – 18:30: Fabian Schlotterbeck and Oliver Bott (Tübingen), Is relative scope assigned incrementally?
Friday, 17 August
  • 17:00 – 18:00: Keynote: Michael Franke (Osnabrück), A probabilistic model of pragmatic quantifier production
  • 18:00 – 18:30: Lisa Bylinina (Leiden), Typology of Numeral Recitation

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: May 15
  • Notification: June 15
  • Workshop: August 13 – 17

Call for Papers

Quantifiers are linguistic expressions encoding representations of quantities. Their study has been one of the great success stories in natural language semantics. On the other hand, the study of the mental representation of numerical and other quantitative information has become an active area of research in cognitive science and neuroscience. This workshop provides a venue for continued exploration of the interface between these two domains. In what ways do cognitive theories of quantities constrain and inform the semantics of quantifiers? Are the quantifiers realized in natural language constrained by our cognitive representations of number? Similarly, can insights from semantics inform the study of the psychology of number? We welcome new experimental and theoretical work at this interface.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Formal semantics and pragmatics of quantifiers
  • Experimental semantics and pragmatics of quantifiers
  • Neuroscience of quantification
  • Corpora research on quantifiers
  • Numerical cognition
  • Mass vs count quantification
  • Procedural semantics
  • Computational models of quantification
  • Learnability of quantifiers
  • Evolution of quantification
  • Cognitive models based on semantic representations
  • Foundational issues at the semantics-cognition interface

We invite anonymized submission of abstracts of 2 pages (12 pt font; 1in or 2.5cm margins) — with an extra page for references of figures — on new research on topics related to those listed above.

Program Committee

  • Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (co-chair)
  • Jakub Szymanik (co-chair)
  • Giosuè Baggio
  • Raffaella Bernardi
  • Jakub Dotlačil
  • Michael Franke
  • Michael Glanzberg
  • Yosef Grodzinsky
  • Dariusz Kalociński
  • Hadas Kotek
  • Steven Piantadosi
  • Fabian Schlotterbeck
  • Stephanie Solt
  • Maria Spychalska
  • Camilo Thorne
  • Barbara Tomaszewicz