Seminars

This seminar extends a Columbia School linguistics analysis of they across an expanded corpus of works by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf. Our presenter will examine they, them, their, and related self-forms to test whether number/gender is encoded or inferred from context, building on earlier Columbia School work with a corpus-based focus.

This seminar will offer a foundational look at Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) through the lens of Linguistics, balancing an overview of current models with their practical research applications and inherent limitations. Our presenter will explore how these technologies intersect with the study of language and conclude by examining the evolving role of the linguist in the AI space, highlighting the unique contributions we are qualified to make.

This seminar will focus on the Mapudungun forms -y, -yngu and -yngün, traditionally described as 3rd person verbal inflections of the indicative mood. While these forms are traditionally classified as singular, dual and plural, respectively, their actual uses cannot always be explained by those number meanings. The presenter will show progress in working towards a meaning hypothesis that successfully accounts for the distribution of these forms in a corpus of attested discourse.

This research is an initial attempt to account for the distribution of three Greek forms—εἰ, ἐὰν, and ἄν—in the New Testament, focusing on the writings attributed to John (Gospel of John, Letters of John, and Revelation). While traditionally described as conditionals, these forms contribute to a range of messages beyond simple “if…then” relations. The study examines the communicative effects to which they contribute, and seeks to identify the distinct semantic values of each signal and how they are used by the writer to guide interpretation within the discourse.

This paper analyzes a moment of speech and gesture repair in Mopan (Mayan). In the example, inflection of the verb ‘go’ is repaired from Irrealis to non-Irrealis, while an accompanying gesture is repaired from a right to a left arm point. On the face of it these two repairs, though simultaneous, seem unrelated. But a look at the surrounding text shows that the simultaneous repairs to grammar and to gesture act as partner components in a single multimodal re-ordering of mental perspective, or ‘frame of reference’, with respect to the landscape being described. In this re-ordering, the speaker switches from invoking a textual ‘map’ within a list of sequential place names to a view of a geographic ‘territory’ in full deictic relation to himself and his body. While deictic locatives have often been excluded from scholarly discussions of spatial frames of reference in language, this multimodal example suggests that such exclusion should be reconsidered.

This Seminar will examine how the “optional” participant functions as a component of the signaling mechanism for two Spanish grammatical systems. The discussion will incorporate insights from Huffman’s From Sound to Signal (2025) and apply them to the semantic domains of Attentionworthiness (Ho-Fernández, forthcoming [2026]) and Control (Ho-Fernández, in progress).