Home Talks and Events All news items
News
Minicourse: Topics Related to the Semantics of Vagueness and Gradability

Paul Egré will give a series of five lectures on topic related to the semantics of vagueness and gradability.

 

These five lectures will take place in the confernece room (Campbell

2122) on the following schedule in five of the following six slots. The exact distribution of lectures relative to slots will be announced later (mark your calendar).

 

Monday, February 27th 1-3pm

Wednesday, February 29th 1-3pm

Friday, March 2nd, 2-4pm

Monday, March 5th, 1-3pm

Wednesday, March 7th, 1-3pm

Friday, March 9th, 2-4pm

 

 

The first three lectures in particular are intended as a course and will be focused on the presentation of the framework of strict-tolerant semantics developed jointly with P. Cobreros, D. Ripley and R. van Rooij to deal with the semantics and pragmatics of vague predicates. The fourth lecture, which does not presuppose this framework, will be on the norm-sensitivity of the vague quantifier `many’.

 

A fifth lecture, of interest also to philosophers, will discuss applications of the strict-tolerant framework to the semantic paradoxes.

 

Lecture 1: Three-valued approaches to vagueness: s’valuationism vs.

truth-functional approaches.The sorites and higher-order vagueness.

 

Lecture 2: The strict-tolerant framework (1). Semantical and logical aspects.

 

Lecture 3: The tolerant-strict framework (2). Applications to the psychology of vague predicates and comparisons with alternative frameworks.

 

Lecture 4: Moral asymmetries and the semantics of `many’.

 

Lecture 5: Strict-Tolerant truth and the semantic paradoxes.

 

Please welcome Paul Egré:


Paul Egré is a CNRS ResearchFellow and a member of Institut Jean‐Nicod since 2005 (PhD in
philosophy in 2004). His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophical logic,
semantics and epistemology. Paul Egré has done work on several topics in these areas, in
particular on embedded questions, conditionals, epistemic logic, and the theory of
vagueness. From 2008 to 2011, Paul Egré directed the ANR (French NSF) research program
‘Cognitive Origins of Vagueness’. He has published several papers in the context of this
project, in particular on the semantics of gradable expressions, the logic of vague predicates,
the epistemic theory of vagueness, as well as on the relation between vagueness, perceptual
ambiguity and the theory of conceptual spaces. Some of his recent publications include
“Vagueness: A Conceptual Spaces Approach” (coauthored with I. Douven, R. Dietz and L.
Decock, Journal of Philosophical Logic 2011), “Tolerant, Classical, Strict” (coauthored with P.
Cobreros, D. Ripley and R. van Rooij, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2010) and the volume
“Vagueness and Language Use”, coedited with N. Klinedinst (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
Since 2011, Paul Egré is also Editor‐in‐Chief of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, a
peer‐reviewed journal published by Springer.

 
Minicourse: Brain Imaging of Language

Brain Imaging of Language

by

Christophe Pallier

 

There will be a series of four lectures all taking place in the Conference room (Campbell 2122)

 

Friday, January 27th, 2-4pm

Monday, January 30th, 1-3pm

Wednesday, February 1st, 1-3pm

Friday, February 3rd, 2-4pm

 

Christophe Pallier will also give a general colloquium on Friday January 27th, 11am-1pm (usual time, usual place on one of the topics below - most likely langauge and music).

 

 

All welcome.

 

General Description ( more details will follow):

What can brain imaging tell us about the cerebral bases of language?

This series of lectures will begin with an overview of modern brain imaging methods, focusing on how images of the functioning brain are obtained. Applications of these techniques to issues in speech perception and sentence processing (especially syntactic parsing) will be presented, as well as some work in the neighboring domain of perception of musical structure. Lastly, one lecture will be devoted to research on the cerebral correlates of language acquisition and bilingualism.
 
UCLA at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
UCLA was very well represented (nine talks and posters) at the recent International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Hong Kong.  For details, click here.
 
Newsletter for 2010-2011

The newsletter is located here.

An archive of older newsletters is located here.
 
Now offering a course on Sign Language!

The Linguistics Department is pleased to inform you of an exciting new course offering this summer.

Linguistics 3
The Structure and Culture of American Sign Language
5 units (LC/PL GE Applicable)

This course will help students develop general knowledge about the properties of human languages and specific knowledge about how sign languages display these properties, covering topics ranging from how babies learn sign language to how sign language are processed in the brain. In addition to this linguistic focus, the class will also focus on the culture of Deafness in the United States and how members of this minority language community view their Deafness as a cultural characteristic, rather than as a disability. Class format will be four hours of lecture/discussion per week plus one weekly section in which students will be asked to do things like debate the medical, political, and social implications of cochlear implant technology or conduct their own fieldwork research with Deaf users of American Sign Language.

This course can be used to satisfy either Literary & Cultural Analysis or Philosophical & Literary Analysis general education requirements for undergraduates at UCLA.

Please e-mail Natasha Abner ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) if you have questions or would like more information.
 
Fellowship Awards

Congratulations to our first-year graduate students who won prestigious multiyear fellowship awards in this year's competitions.
Read more...