Events

Join Us for a Candidate Research Prensentation!

Students, Faculty, and Staff are invited to attend this research presentation by one of our Cogntive Science Tenure-Track candidates. They will present their latest research, sharing insights and potential contribution to our departments. This is a fantastic opportunity to engage with emerrging research and provide feedback on the candidate's work!

Talk abstract:

"Humans are incredibly good at understanding what's happening around them, rapidly sorting through a wealth of information to figure out who's doing what to whom. Equally impressive is our ability to communicate that understanding with one another using language. In fact, many of the patterns we find in language reflect that very purpose. As a result, language is a powerful tool for studying the structure of our inner worlds. This talk will explore the close relationship between language and event cognition through the lens of English pronoun choice.

In English, both reflexive pronouns like herself and personal pronouns like her can be used to refer back to someone mentioned earlier in the sentence. The choice between them is often fully decided by grammatical rules requiring one form or the other. However, there are corners of English where the crisp complementarity captured by grammatical rules breaks down. One such place is within prepositional phrases, as in Michele set a glass next to her/herself, where either form can be used to refer back to the sentence subject. Drawing on experimental evidence, the candidate will show that pronoun choice in English prepositional phrases crucially depends on how speakers think about the events the sentences describe. In particular, the felexive is favored whenever the person it picks out fills more than one role (e.g., actor and goal) in one and the same event. This preference becomes even stronger when repeated reference to the sentence subject is relatively unexpected given our knowledge of how events typically unfold. In this way, the seemingly small choice between reflexes and personal pronouns proves to be valuable window into how wer represent events in the mind, and how grammar and event cognition work together to shape linguistic behavior."