Attitude ascriptions and speech reports
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Description
Attitude ascriptions and speech reports have a special place in Cognitive Science. ‘Recursion hunters’ (The New York Times, March 21, 2012) try to track them down in every human language, looking for evidence for complex syntax. Developmental psychologists consider them milestones in the cognitive development of children. Philosophers have linked them to ambiguities that don’t seem to exist anywhere else. What is it that makes attitude ascriptions and speech reports stand out? Why are they so hard to acquire? And where do those curious ambiguities come from?
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Angelika Kratzer
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Cartography and explanation
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Description
Syntactic structures are complex objects built by simple generating devices. The cartography of syntactic structures is a research program which tries to do two things: it addresses the complexity of syntactic structures by drawing structural maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations across languages; and it tries to trace back the observed properties to simple generating devices and computational principles of the minimalist kind (Chomsky 1995), and to identify the parametrization required to capture the observed variation (see Cinque and Rizzi 2010, Rizzi and Cinque 2016 for general overviews).
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Luigi Rizzi
University of Geneva, University of Siena