Colloquium: Stealing interpretations? Failed investigations into structural reanalysis"

On Wednesday 25 Nov 2020 Matthew Husband (University of Oxford) will be presenting at the LLS Colloquium series, with a talk titled "Stealing interpretations? Failed investigations into structural reanalysis".

Stealing interpretations? Failed investigations into structural reanalysis

Sometimes theories just don’t stand up to empirical evidence, regardless of how intuitively persuasive their predictions may have initially been. In this talk, I discuss just such a case in my recent work investigating what misinterpretation tells us about garden-path reanalysis. While most research on misinterpretation has implicitly relied on temporarily available constituents that are later undone in reanalysis, I will focus on reduced relative clause garden-paths where no such temporary constituent appears. I propose that these garden-paths can be used to investigate ‘steal’, a reanalysis operation suggested by Fodor & Inoue (1994, 1998), where ‘steal’ temporarily forms the relevant constituent for misinterpretation of these garden-paths during the reanalysis process. I will then show in a series of experiments that this prediction is just plain wrong. There is no systematic misinterpretation with reduced relative clause garden-paths. I’ll discuss the consequences of these results and how they are guiding my current theorizing on structural reanalysis.

Colloquium 25 November 2020 (PDF , 391kb)

The talk will take place at 4:00 pm on Zoom, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. To join: click on this link.