Gillian Ramchand
Biographic Data
| ID | 983665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gillian Ramchand |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gillian |
| FAMILY NAME | Ramchand |
| SIGNATURE | RAMCHAND G |
| AFFILIATIONS | UiT The Arctic University of Norway |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8019-0630 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 100 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The simple past versus perfect in English: Evidence from Visual World eye tracking
We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrat…
How (not) to look for meaning composition in the brain: A reassessment of current experimental paradigms
When we use language, we draw on a finite stock of lexical and functional meanings and grammatical structures to assign meanings to expressions of arbitrary complexity. According to the Principle of Compositionality, the meanings of complex expressions are a function of constituent meanings and syntax, and are generated by the recursive application of one or more composition operations . Given their central role in explanatory accounts of human l…
Aspect processing across languages: A visual world eye-tracking study
The study employed a combination of a picture selection task and Visual World eye-tracking to investigate the processing of grammatical aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) in three languages: Russian, Spanish and English. In order to probe into the cognitive representations triggered by the aspectual forms we contrasted visual representations of different temporal portions of telic events—a snapshot of the process stage (ongoing event) and a sna…
Truth is dead; long live the truth. Commentary on Conjoining Meanings by Paul Pietroski
Pietroski successfully dismantles the idea of a formal semantic theory based on direct truth conditions and offers new and formally constrained alternatives. In this paper, I summarize the arguments but also provide a number of test cases to show that refusing to accept Pietroski's conclusions condemns the field to constantly restating and technically evading its own self‐created paradoxes. In the final section, I offer some positive proposals in…
Content, modals and attitude predicates
The formal semantic tradition in linguistics has been dominated by a very specific toolbox, and set of choices for being explicit about truth conditions. If we grant that the job of semantics is to explain how language works to create systematic and exploitable relationships between the symbols deployed and a commonly apprisable external reality, we need to have a method in place for describing the relation between language and that external real…
Verbal Symbols and Demonstrations Across Modalities
In this paper, I develop a new theory of the ingredients of semantic composition for the verb phrase, building on work in Ramchand (2018). I argue that the essential properties of this new approach make possible a new rapprochement between the theoretical analyses of symbolic verbal meaning across the visual and auditory modalities. The innovation of the new theory is that it partitions the verb phrase into a lower purely symbolic zone and a high…
Alternating adjectives
The paper describes a puzzle in the semantics of a class of English adjectives which alternate systematically in meaning. We know from the literature on adjectival meanings that the STIMULUS vs. EXPERIENCER pair of roles forms the basis of two kinds of adjectives in English depending on whether the STIMULUS or the EXPERIENCER is the one who holds the property. Our puzzle adjectives alternate between these two readings in a way parallel to the mor…
Deriving variable linearization: A commentary on Simpson and Syed (2013)
Deriving the functional hierarchy
Verb Meaning and the Lexicon: A First Phase Syntax
The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and …
Perfectivity as aspectual definiteness: Time and the event in Russian
The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces
'The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces' explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. This book shows how these interactions are reflected in linguistic & cognitive theory, considers what they reveal, & looks at their reflections in expression & communication.
Minimalism
This article provides an overview of the issues that have motivated generative grammar and the changes within the specifically Chomskian line of thinking which culminates in the Minimalist Program (MP). Some of the Minimalist considerations were central to Chomsky's approach to language from the very beginning, at a time when psychology was dominated by behaviourism and linguistic studies were the property of two schools of thought. The concept I…
Events in Syntax: Modification and Predication
What are the motivations for including event variables in our representations of natural language semantics? The article focuses narrowly on the issues that provided the basis for the original discussion in Davidson (1967), and seeks to explore its consequences for the advances in syntax and the interface that have taken place since then. The existence of an event variable in semantic representations is argued to be as necessary as it ever was, b…
Post-Davidsonianism
The pioneering work of Davidson (1967) gave rise to a productive and exciting tradition within formal semantics and especially at the interface between syntax and semantics, whereby event variables were exploited as elements of the referential ontology in the expression of the semantics of natural language. The existence of such logical elements (events, or eventuality variables) cannot seriously now be doubted, in my opinion, although many aspec…
Merge and Move: Wh-Dependencies Revisited
In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architecture of the grammar, apparentwh-dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diagnostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together wit…
Predication and Equation
In this article, we argue that a structural distinction between predicational and equative copular clauses is illusory. All semantic predicational relationships are constructed asymmetrically via a syntactic predicational head; differences reduce to whether this head bears an event variable or not. This allows us to maintain a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface in the face of apparently recalcitrant data from Scottish Gaelic
Predication and equation
English is one language where equative sentences and non-equative sentences have a similar surface syntax (but see Heggie 1988 and Moro 1997 for a discussion of more subtle differences). In this paper we address the fact that many other languages appear to use radically different morphological means which seem to map to intuitive differences in the type of predication expressed. We take one such language, Scottish Gaelic, and show that the real d…
Two subject positions in Scottish Gaelic: The syntax-semantics interface
Merge and Move: Wh-Dependencies Revisited
In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architecture of the grammar, apparentwh-dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diagnostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together wit…
Deriving the functional hierarchy
Predication and Equation
In this article, we argue that a structural distinction between predicational and equative copular clauses is illusory. All semantic predicational relationships are constructed asymmetrically via a syntactic predicational head; differences reduce to whether this head bears an event variable or not. This allows us to maintain a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface in the face of apparently recalcitrant data from Scottish Gaelic
Perfectivity as aspectual definiteness: Time and the event in Russian
Two subject positions in Scottish Gaelic: The syntax-semantics interface
Deriving variable linearization: A commentary on Simpson and Syed (2013)
Events in Syntax: Modification and Predication
What are the motivations for including event variables in our representations of natural language semantics? The article focuses narrowly on the issues that provided the basis for the original discussion in Davidson (1967), and seeks to explore its consequences for the advances in syntax and the interface that have taken place since then. The existence of an event variable in semantic representations is argued to be as necessary as it ever was, b…
Two subject positions in Scottish Gaelic: The syntax-semantics interface
Predication and equation
English is one language where equative sentences and non-equative sentences have a similar surface syntax (but see Heggie 1988 and Moro 1997 for a discussion of more subtle differences). In this paper we address the fact that many other languages appear to use radically different morphological means which seem to map to intuitive differences in the type of predication expressed. We take one such language, Scottish Gaelic, and show that the real d…
Predication and Equation
In this article, we argue that a structural distinction between predicational and equative copular clauses is illusory. All semantic predicational relationships are constructed asymmetrically via a syntactic predicational head; differences reduce to whether this head bears an event variable or not. This allows us to maintain a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface in the face of apparently recalcitrant data from Scottish Gaelic
Post-Davidsonianism
The pioneering work of Davidson (1967) gave rise to a productive and exciting tradition within formal semantics and especially at the interface between syntax and semantics, whereby event variables were exploited as elements of the referential ontology in the expression of the semantics of natural language. The existence of such logical elements (events, or eventuality variables) cannot seriously now be doubted, in my opinion, although many aspec…
Merge and Move: Wh-Dependencies Revisited
In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architecture of the grammar, apparentwh-dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diagnostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together wit…
The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces
'The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces' explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. This book shows how these interactions are reflected in linguistic & cognitive theory, considers what they reveal, & looks at their reflections in expression & communication.
Minimalism
This article provides an overview of the issues that have motivated generative grammar and the changes within the specifically Chomskian line of thinking which culminates in the Minimalist Program (MP). Some of the Minimalist considerations were central to Chomsky's approach to language from the very beginning, at a time when psychology was dominated by behaviourism and linguistic studies were the property of two schools of thought. The concept I…
Events in Syntax: Modification and Predication
What are the motivations for including event variables in our representations of natural language semantics? The article focuses narrowly on the issues that provided the basis for the original discussion in Davidson (1967), and seeks to explore its consequences for the advances in syntax and the interface that have taken place since then. The existence of an event variable in semantic representations is argued to be as necessary as it ever was, b…
Verb Meaning and the Lexicon: A First Phase Syntax
The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and …
Perfectivity as aspectual definiteness: Time and the event in Russian
Deriving variable linearization: A commentary on Simpson and Syed (2013)
Deriving the functional hierarchy
Alternating adjectives
The paper describes a puzzle in the semantics of a class of English adjectives which alternate systematically in meaning. We know from the literature on adjectival meanings that the STIMULUS vs. EXPERIENCER pair of roles forms the basis of two kinds of adjectives in English depending on whether the STIMULUS or the EXPERIENCER is the one who holds the property. Our puzzle adjectives alternate between these two readings in a way parallel to the mor…
Verbal Symbols and Demonstrations Across Modalities
In this paper, I develop a new theory of the ingredients of semantic composition for the verb phrase, building on work in Ramchand (2018). I argue that the essential properties of this new approach make possible a new rapprochement between the theoretical analyses of symbolic verbal meaning across the visual and auditory modalities. The innovation of the new theory is that it partitions the verb phrase into a lower purely symbolic zone and a high…
Truth is dead; long live the truth. Commentary on Conjoining Meanings by Paul Pietroski
Pietroski successfully dismantles the idea of a formal semantic theory based on direct truth conditions and offers new and formally constrained alternatives. In this paper, I summarize the arguments but also provide a number of test cases to show that refusing to accept Pietroski's conclusions condemns the field to constantly restating and technically evading its own self‐created paradoxes. In the final section, I offer some positive proposals in…
Content, modals and attitude predicates
The formal semantic tradition in linguistics has been dominated by a very specific toolbox, and set of choices for being explicit about truth conditions. If we grant that the job of semantics is to explain how language works to create systematic and exploitable relationships between the symbols deployed and a commonly apprisable external reality, we need to have a method in place for describing the relation between language and that external real…
How (not) to look for meaning composition in the brain: A reassessment of current experimental paradigms
When we use language, we draw on a finite stock of lexical and functional meanings and grammatical structures to assign meanings to expressions of arbitrary complexity. According to the Principle of Compositionality, the meanings of complex expressions are a function of constituent meanings and syntax, and are generated by the recursive application of one or more composition operations . Given their central role in explanatory accounts of human l…
Aspect processing across languages: A visual world eye-tracking study
The study employed a combination of a picture selection task and Visual World eye-tracking to investigate the processing of grammatical aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) in three languages: Russian, Spanish and English. In order to probe into the cognitive representations triggered by the aspectual forms we contrasted visual representations of different temporal portions of telic events—a snapshot of the process stage (ongoing event) and a sna…
The simple past versus perfect in English: Evidence from Visual World eye tracking
We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrat…
Linguistics (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (12 works) · Syntax (9 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Programming language (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Mathematics (6 works)