Dr. Lyn Tieu
Fri, Mar 14
|University of Calgary | CHE 212
Dr. Lyn Tieu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. She is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Lyn conducts research in experimental and developmental semantics and pragmatics, using experiment
Time & Location
Mar 14, 2025, 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
University of Calgary | CHE 212, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
About the event
Linguistic inferences beyond words
Research in contemporary semantics has uncovered a typology of linguistic inferences, characterized by their conversational status and their behaviour in complex sentences. This typology of linguistic inferences is usually thought to be specific to language and in part lexically encoded in the meanings of words. In this talk, I will present experimental evidence that people can nevertheless draw linguistic inferences, such as implicatures and presuppositions, from gestures, sound effects, visual animations, and emoji. The finding that we can replicate what are normally thought to be language-specific inferences – using non-words – raises
fundamental questions about the nature of linguistic inferences and how we might acquire them.
About the speaker:
Dr. Lyn Tieu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto. She is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Lyn conducts research in experimental and developmental semantics and pragmatics, using experimental methods to investigate the nature of linguistic meaning and how it is acquired by young children. Lyn also currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief at Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.