Home > Events > Linguistics Colloquium: Itamar Francez (UChicago)

Linguistics Colloquium: Itamar Francez (UChicago)

Time: 
Friday, November 17, 2017 - 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: 
2130 HJ Patterson Hall

Title: Love and Happiness

Abstract:

(Joint work with Andrew Koontz-Garboden, University of Manchester)

In this talk we make a proposal for what ‘love’ is and for how to derive ‘happiness’. Specifically, building on the theory of property concept nouns advanced in our recent book (Francez and Koontz-Garboden 2017), according to which they denote qualities (a particular kind of mass) , we propose a compositional account of English deadjectival nominalization like happiness, strength, and depth, on which the derivational suffixes are systematically ...

 

Bio: Itamar Francez is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He focuses his research on natural language meaning. He works in formal semantics, using logical tools to model the intuitions speakers have about the meaning of expressions in their native tongues. One aspect of his research explores how such tools can be used to explain the relation between meaning and form. Recent interests include the role of meaning in principled cross-linguistic variation and the interaction between conventional linguistic meaning and pragmatic reasoning in the overall significance of linguistic expressions