Emmanuel Chemla
Biographic Data
| ID | 1287586 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emmanuel Chemla |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emmanuel |
| FAMILY NAME | Chemla |
| SIGNATURE | CHEMLA E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8423-5880 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Large language models as proxies for theories of human linguistic cognition
We consider the possible role of current large language models (LLMs) in the study of human linguistic cognition. We focus on the use of such models as proxies for theories of cognition that are relatively linguistically-neutral in their representations and learning but differ from current LLMs in key ways. We illustrate this potential use of LLMs as proxies for theories of cognition in the context of two kinds of questions: (a) whether the targe…
Ancestral Meanings: A prelude to evolutionary animal linguistics
Anti‐Babel: Three degrees of interspecies comprehension
While recent “animal linguistics” treats call form as arbitrary, various results suggest that some animals use a biological code to understand the calls of unrelated/unfamiliar species. To clarify matters, we distinguish among three degrees of interspecies comprehension. In the first (“Understand thy neighbor”), a species understands the calls of a neighboring species through exposure. In the second (“call convergence”), it understands the calls …
Second-Order Zipf’s Law for Word Co-Occurrences
Many advances in NLP, starting with distributional semantics, are founded on the insight that the semantics of words can be revealed by their co-occurrences (the frequency for two words to be present in the same sentence). And the most sophisticated modern machines are built to reproduce the statistics of even larger sets of words. Yet, these systems do not provide a transparent description of these statistics. We reveal a second-order Zipf’s law…
Assessing Pressures Shaping Natural Language Lexica
Human languages balance communicative informativity with complexity, conveying as much as needed through the simplest means required to do so. Yet, these concepts—informativity and complexity—have been operationalized in various ways, and it remains unclear which definitions best capture empirical linguistic patterns. A particularly successful operationalization is that offered by the Information Bottleneck framework, which suggests a balance bet…
Female Diana Monkeys Have Complex Calls
We argue that female Diana monkeys (Cercopithecus diana) can form complex calls by combining an A call with other elementary calls. We reject (on both empirical and conceptual grounds) a combination-free analysis based on accidental homophony, and we consider two main analyses: the Acoustic Theory takes the combination to be merely acoustic, whereas the Affixal Theory takes A to function as a suffix. We provide limited arguments for the Affixal T…
Word learning tasks as a window into the triggering problem for presuppositions
In this paper, we show that native speakers spontaneously divide the complex meaning of a new word into a presuppositional component and an assertive component. These results argue for the existence of a productive triggering algorithm for presuppositions, one that is not based on alternative lexical items nor on contextual salience. On a methodological level, the proposed learning paradigm can be used to test further theories concerned with the …
Large Language Models and the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus
According to much of theoretical linguistics, a fair amount of our linguistic knowledge is innate. One of the best-known (and most contested) kinds of evidence for a large innate endowment is the argument from the poverty of the stimulus (APS). An APS obtains when human learners systematically make inductive leaps that are not warranted by the linguistic evidence. A weakness of the APS has been that it is very hard to assess what is warranted by …
Iconic Syntax: Sign language classifier predicates and gesture sequences
Super Linguistics: An introduction
We argue that formal linguistic theory, properly extended, can provide a unifying framework for diverse phenomena beyond traditional linguistic objects. We display applications to pictorial meanings, visual narratives, music, dance, animal communication, and, more abstractly, to logical and non-logical concepts in the ‘language of thought’ and reasoning. In many of these cases, a careful analysis reveals that classic linguistic notions are pervas…
The influence of polarity items on inferential judgments
Stereotyped Vocalizations
Referential and general calls in primate semantics
Conceptual alternatives: Competition in language and beyond
From many-valued consequence to many-valued connectives
The effect of three basic task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment tasks
Sprouse and Almeida (2017) provide a first systematic investigation of the sensitivity of four acceptability judgment tasks. In this project, we build on these results by decomposing those tasks into three constituent task features (single versus joint presentation, number of response options, and use of response labels), and explore the consequences of those task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment experiments. We present 6 add…
Connectedness as a constraint on exhaustification
Connecting Content and Logical Words
Content words (e.g. nouns and adjectives) are generally connected: there are no gaps in their denotations; no noun means ‘table or shoe’ or ‘animal or house’. We explore a formulation of connectedness which is applicable to content and logical words alike, and which compares well with the classic notion of monotonicity for quantifiers. On a first inspection, logical words satisfy this generalized version of the connectedness property at least as …
Distinctions between primary and secondary scalar implicatures
Mouse tracking as a window into decision making
Children's Acquisition of Homogeneity in Plural Definite Descriptions
Plural definite descriptions give rise to homogeneity effects: the positive "The trucks are blue" and the negative "The trucks aren't blue" are both neither true nor false when some of the trucks are blue and some are not, that is, when the group of trucks is not homogeneous with respect to the property of being blue (Löbner 1987, 2000; Schwarzschild 1994; Križ 2015c). The only existing acquisition studies related to the phenomenon have examined …
Quantifier Spreading in Child Language as Distributive Inferences
International audience
Competition and Symmetry in an Artificial Word Learning Task
Natural language involves competition. The sentences we choose to utter activate alternative sentences (those we chose not to utter), which hearers typically infer to be false. Hence, as a first approximation, the more alternatives a sentence activates, the more inferences it will trigger. But a closer look at the theory of competition shows that this is not quite true and that under specific circumstances, so-called symmetric alternatives cancel…
Intervention effects in NPI licensing: A quantitative assessment of the scalar implicature explanation
This paper reports on five experiments investigating intervention effects in negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Such intervention effects involve the unexpected ungrammaticality of sentences that contain an intervener, such as a universal quantifier, in between the NPI and its licensor. For example, the licensing of the NPI any in the sentence *Monkey didn’t give every lion any chocolate is disrupted by intervention. Interveners also happen …
Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments
The nature of the semantic contribution of co-speech gestures has been the subject of recent theoretical and experimental investigation. Such gestures have been reported to give rise to cosuppositional inferences that can project out of certain linguistic environments, much in the way that presuppositions of verbal expressions do (Schlenker 2018a; b). For example, a sentence like “John will not [use the stairs]_UP”, produced with a finger pointed…
Presuppositions of quantified sentences: Experimental Data
Scalar implicatures of embedded disjunction
Remarks on the Experimental Turn in the Study of Scalar Implicature, Part I
for Part I and Part II)There has been a recent 'experimental turn' in the study of scalar implicature, yielding important results concerning online processing and acquisition. This paper highlights some of these results and places them in the current theoretical context. We argue that there is sometimes a mismatch between theoretical and experimental studies, and we point out how some of these mismatches can be resolved. We furthermore highlight …
Interpreting numerals and scalar items under memory load
Pyow-hack revisited: Two analyses of Putty-nosed monkey alarm calls
Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity
Remarks on the Experimental Turn in the Study of Scalar Implicature, Part II
In Part I, we have introduced two of the main approaches to scalar implicature: the Gricean approach and the grammatical approach. We have argued that although they rely on conceptually different views about the phenomenon, they share various insights, and we argued that their empirical differences were more subtle than what one may have expected. In this second part of this review paper, we will sample some experimental results with two goals in…
Gestural agreement
Experiments on the acceptability and possible readings of questions embedded under emotive-factives
Emotive-factive predicates, such as surprise or be happy, are a source of empirical and theoretical puzzles in the literature on embedded questions. Although they embed wh-questions, they seem not to embed whether-questions. They have complex interactions with negative polarity items such as any or even, and they have been argued to preferentially give rise to weakly exhaustive readings with embedded questions (in contrasts with most other verbs,…
Titi semantics: Context and meaning in Titi monkey call sequences
An Epistemic Step for Anti-Presuppositions
Sentence (1) strongly suggests that the speaker does not have a sister: According to Heim (1991), Percus (2006), and Sauerland (2006), this inference should follow from the comparison of (1) to (1a). However, such an analysis would only predict a very weak implicature: it is not common belief that the speaker has a sister. I propose to strengthen this prediction by two means. First, I rely on a precise understanding of the modern Stalnakerian vie…
Transparency theory: Empirical issues and psycholinguistic routes
The transparency theory of presupposition projection advocated by Schlenker (2008a) relies on two fairly independent assumptions. First, it describes the interaction between two general principles given in (1) and (2). These two new sub-maxims of manner together govern the use of explicit conjunctions and complex meanings (presuppositional items) to package information. (1) Be Articulate: In any syntactic environment, express the meaning of an ex…
Universal Implicatures and Free Choice Effects: Experimental Data
Universal inferences like (i) have been taken as evidence for a local/syntactic treatment of scalar implicatures (i.e. theories where the enrichment of "some" into "some but not all" can happen sub-sententially): (i) Everybody read some of the books --> Everybody read [some but not all the books]. In this paper, I provide experimental evidence which casts doubt on this argument. The counter-argument relies on a new set of data involving free choi…
Categorizing words using ‘frequent frames’: What cross‐linguistic analyses reveal about distributional acquisition strategies
Mintz (2003) described a distributional environment called a frame, defined as the co-occurrence of two context words with one intervening target word. Analyses of English child-directed speech showed that words that fell within any frequently occurring frame consistently belonged to the same grammatical category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, etc.). In this paper, we first generalize this result to French, a language in which the function word sys…
Presuppositions of quantified sentences: Experimental Data
Experimental Evidence for Embedded Scalar Implicatures
Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences that result from a reasoning about speakers' communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories that propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive computation of meaning—something that is not expected under…
Modularity and intuitions in formal semantics: The case of polarity items
Incremental vs. symmetric accounts of presupposition projection: An experimental approach
Moral Judgments and Semantic Judgments: A Case Study (Comments on Mikhail)
In Mikhail (2011),1 John Mikhail developed an ambitious research program for moral psychology, one that has both a sophisticated theoretical component and a rich empirical base. Rather than commenting on Mikhail’s oeuvre, we thought the best tribute we could offer to his pioneering contribution was to show in detail how his ideas inspired one of our recent experimental endeavors—a modest one, but one which is consonant, we hope, with Mikhail’s ow…
Predicting moral judgments from causal judgments
Several factors have been put forward to explain the variability of moral judgments for superficially analogous moral dilemmas, in particular in the paradigm of trolley cases. In this paper we elaborate on Mikhail's view that (i) causal analysis is at the core of moral judgments and that (ii) causal judgments can be quantified by linguistic methods. According to this model, our moral judgments depend both on utilitarian considerations (whether po…
Scalar implicatures: Working memory and a comparison with only
A Scalar Implicature (SI) arises when the use of a relatively weak sentence (e.g., some politicians are corrupt) implies the denial of an alternative, stronger sentence (e.g., not all politicians are corrupt). The cognitive effort associated with the processing of SIs involves central memory resources (De Neys and Schaeken, 2007; Dieussaert et al., 2011; Marty et al., 2013). The goal of this study is to locate this previous result within the curr…
Experimenting on Contextualism
In this article we refine the design of context shifting experiments , which play a central role in contextualist debates, and we subject a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including ‘know’ and color adjectives like ‘green’, to experimental investigation. Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examine, thereby ove…
Interpreting numerals and scalar items under memory load
A Psycholinguistic Study of the Exhaustive Readings of Embedded Questions
What is the semantic content of a question? As pointed out by Karttunen (1977) , declarative sentences that embed interrogative complements (such as ‘John knows which students called’) can provide relatively easy access to the semantics of questions. Recent theories attribute different readings to such sentences and their predictions depend in various ways on the embedding verb (‘know’ in this example). Through a series of four experiments, we pr…
Monkey semantics: Two ‘dialects’ of Campbell’s monkey alarm calls
Remarks on the Experimental Turn in the Study of Scalar Implicature, Part II
In Part I, we have introduced two of the main approaches to scalar implicature: the Gricean approach and the grammatical approach. We have argued that although they rely on conceptually different views about the phenomenon, they share various insights, and we argued that their empirical differences were more subtle than what one may have expected. In this second part of this review paper, we will sample some experimental results with two goals in…
Remarks on the Experimental Turn in the Study of Scalar Implicature, Part I
for Part I and Part II)There has been a recent 'experimental turn' in the study of scalar implicature, yielding important results concerning online processing and acquisition. This paper highlights some of these results and places them in the current theoretical context. We argue that there is sometimes a mismatch between theoretical and experimental studies, and we point out how some of these mismatches can be resolved. We furthermore highlight …
Can we Agree About agree
Linguistic Experiments and Ordinary Language Philosophy
J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods …
Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity
Scalar implicatures of embedded disjunction
Using Structural Priming to Study Scopal Representations and Operations
International audience
Children’s exhaustive readings of questions
Shared and distinct mechanisms in deriving linguistic enrichment
Meanings of basic expressions can be enriched by considering what the speaker could have said, but chose not to, that is, the alternatives. We report three priming experiments that test whether there are shared enrichment mechanisms across a diverse range of linguistic categories. We find that quantifier, number, and ad hoc enrichments exhibit robust priming within their categories and between each other. Plural enrichments, in contrast, demonstr…
On the Role of Alternatives in the Acquisition of Simple and Complex Disjunctions in French and Japanese
Computer Science (51 works) · Linguistics (47 works) · Philosophy (46 works) · Psychology (39 works) · Artificial Intelligence (29 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Mathematics (23 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (23 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Sentence (14 works)