The Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, extends a warm welcome to our 2022 Randolph Quirk Fellow, Professor Kathryn Davidson (Harvard University). Professor Davidson will deliver a public lecture with the details below.

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The Value of Symbolic Abstraction for Compositionality

Although human language is the paradigmatic example of arbitrary symbols used to construct and communicate ideas, humans are also expert users of iconic depictions, which, like language, can be infinitely creative and precise. Given this, what is the value of having both systems? If we think in something like a symbolic Language of Thought, why do we also depict with icons? Conversely, given the creativity in iconic depiction, what’s the additional value of symbolic abstraction? Is it simply that some things are more imageable than others? I suggest that the difference comes down not just to what we can(not) picture, but what we can ask and answer: that iconic representations inherently do not lend themselves to supporting inferences over alternatives e.g. for negation, question formation, focus and implicature, etc. This difference explains some puzzles as well as absences in compositionality between the symbolic and iconic in spoken language, sign language, and gesture, and ultimately makes the case for a multi-format framework for modelling meaning in cognitive science.

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This Year's Quirk Fellow

Kathryn Davidson is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard Linguistics Department, where she directs the Meaning and Modality Lab. Her research is at the intersection of natural language semantics and pragmatics, with focus on crosslinguistic semantic data, especially from sign languages, as well as the use of experimental methodologies in semantics, semantic and pragmatic development, and language and cognition.

Kate received her PhD in 2011 in from the University of California, San Diego, and had postdoctoral appointments at the University of Connecticut and the Cognitive Science program at Yale University.

Public Lecture | Prof. Kathryn Davidson | Randolph Quirk Fellow 2022