LLMs have been studied in recent linguistics as potential models of humans' linguistic abilities. Here we discuss an entirely different use of AI, namely as a co-scientist, to help construct and asses...

Some grammatical properties are extremely stable across sign languages, and may arise spontaneously in homesign systems. In particular, signers refer to objects and individuals by creating locations f...

While Kaplan's classic theory of indexicals took them to be rigidly anchored to the context of the actual speech act, more recent research has found multiple cases in which an indexical depends on the...

Following a "multimodal revolution" in the language sciences, meaning is now studied not just in speech but also in sign languages ('sign') and in gestures. Seven lessons can be drawn from recent rese...

Les abeilles transmettent des informations sur les sources de nourriture à l’aide d’un « langage dansé » très sophi

Bees communicate information about food sources using a sophisticated "dance language".

Several recent analyses of animal signals have proposed that when animals have the choice between a signal S and a more informative signal S+ , S+ is preferred if it is true (= Informativity Principle...

Interest in animal communication has arguably reached an all-time high, with two very visible projects—the search for the animal roots of human language and the development of methods and technologies...

Interest in animal communication has arguably reached an all-time high, with two very visible projects—the search for the animal roots of human language and the development of methods and technologies...

(The schedule is still somewhat tentative, as we will adapt things as the seminar progresses)

Theoretical linguistics has made great strides towards a proper science of language, building on solid foundations in logic and analytical philosophy, and, more recently, joining forces with empirical...

We argue that sign language requires a radical extension of formal semantics. It has long been accepted that sign language employs the same logical machinery as spoken language (occasionally making it...

In sign language, classifier predicates have a highly iconic semantics, which has motivated the development of a formal framework ('Iconological Semantics') with a pictorial component evaluated relati...