A Syntax-Semantics Interface in an Extraterrestrial Language: A Thought Experiment | Dr. Carol Tenny (

This paper presents a thought experiment about the structure of the language of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).  Any actual investigation of any ETI language is so far out of reach, that it can only be approached through a thought experiment. However, I will try to make this thought experiment as concrete as possible, by grounding it in some concrete assumptions I feel confident in making. I will arrive at a reduced and simplified version of a compositional syntax-semantics interface, from what we know about human language and the best assumptions about ETI language. This experiment will necessarily be influenced by what we know about natural language, but I will try as much as possible to be free of preconceived ideas.

About the speaker:

Dr. Tenny has experience in industry covering many aspects of natural language processing. These include ontologies and semantic annotation, named entity recognition, discourse annotation, sentiment extraction, statistical and rule-based parsers, machine translation, and working with a variety of corpus types. She has also worked as Japanese Language Technology Manager designing systems for disabled persons who communicate using keyboard systems to speak (Semantic Compaction Systems), as well as other diverse experience in Japanese Language Technology. In her theoretical linguistics work, she studies the ways in which time, space, change and causation are encoded in the meanings of verbs, as well as the grammar of point of view and the interface of grammar and modality.