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Logical Semantics

The second new research program breaks new ground in a completely under-researched language domain: logical semantics (LS). Logical semantics has to do with important subtleties in sentence interpretation and often depends on "small" function words such as quantifiers (some, many, all) and negative polarity items (any, ever) that have crucial impact on computing the truth value of a sentence. Examples of anomalies in LS that we will investigate are: I *ever smoked a cigar. / There is *every man in the garden. / *Some circles are round (Ladusaw 1980; Reuland & term Meulen 1987; Kunious & Holcomb 1992). Discussions of the relation of LS to other linguistic domains (conceptual semantics, syntax, pragmatics) are highly controversial, and neuroscientific studies are virtually absent. Two new projects on "neurocognition of logical semantics" that I initiated (with collaborators Dr Dwivedi at Brock, Tier-1 CRC Dr Grodzinsky in Linguistics, and Dr Drury in my lab) have just begun, and so will be one major component of my overall research program for the next 5 years. A PhD student will be recruited in 2008 or 2009 and will be involved in all research activities. Funded by SSHRC and the CRLMB, we will strive to assume international leadership in this innovative field. The LS projects will combine a large number of methodological approaches (ERPs, fMRI and eyetracking) and also study LS in L1 and L2 learners. Importantly, our two previous exploratory ERP studies on LS have consistently revealed a novel biphasic ERP profile, the first component of which resembles the well-known P600 effect for syntactic violations. If we can demonstrate a functional correspondence between the two ERP patterns in an interference paradigm combining both types of violations (e.g., **There are usually [the photo of Berlin] on the wall.), this would have significant consequences for the interpretation of P600s in general. This research not only pioneers a new area in cognitive neuroscience, but also promises to provide important insights that can feed back to linguistic semantics and may connect with efforts in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language to understand the links between language and human reasoning/inference.

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