Lucas Champollion - New York University

Lucas Champollion - New York University
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Lucas Champollion
New York University
Linguistics
Faculty Member
Stanford University
Linguistics
Exchange Scholar
Palo Alto Research Center
Natural language theory and technology (NLTT) lab
Department Member
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
TüZLi: Tübinger Zentrum für Linguistik
Post-Doc
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Cleo Condoravdi and Aravind K. Joshi
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+1 (212) 998-8692
Lucas Champollion
NYU Department of Linguistics
10 Washington Place, room 412 (fourth floor)
New York, NY 10003
United States
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Papers by Lucas Champollion
Breaking de Morgan's law in counterfactual antecedents
The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and ...
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The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relation between the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. We report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals, based on a context in which a light is controlled by two switches. Our main finding is that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) "switch A or switch B is down" and (ii) "switch A and switch B are not both up" make different semantic contributions when embedded in a conditional antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that (i) and (ii) differ in meaning, which implies that the meaning of a sentential clause cannot be identified with its truth conditions. We show that our data have a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: in a conditional antecedent, (i) introduces two distinct assumptions, while (ii) introduces only one. Independently of the complications stemming from disjunctive antecedents, our results also challenge analyses of counterfactuals in terms of minimal change from the actual state of affairs: we show that such analyses cannot account for our findings, regardless of what changes are considered minimal.
Refining stratified reference
This is a reply to the comments by Corver, Doetjes, Link, Piñón, Schwarzschild, and Syrett on the...
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This is a reply to the comments by Corver, Doetjes, Link, Piñón, Schwarzschild, and Syrett on the target article in this volume, 'Stratified reference: The common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement.' Stratified reference is designed to capture semantic oppositions involving atelicity, plurality and mass reference, extensive measure functions, distributivity, and collectivity. Following suggestions by some of the commentators, stratified reference is refined here in two ways: it is restricted to the parts of the event or individual in question, and its granularity parameter is instantiated with a predicate built around mereological proper parthood and degree ordering.
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Doetjes proposes combining strati ed and cumulative reference to address challenges with incremental-theme verbs.
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Stratified reference: The common core of distributivity, aspect, and measurement
Why can I tell you that I ran for five minutes but not that I ''*ran to the store for five minute...
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Why can I tell you that I ran for five minutes but not that I ''*ran to the store for five minutes''? Why can we talk about ''five pounds of books'' but not about ''*five pounds of book''? What keeps you from saying ''*sixty degrees of water'' when you can say ''sixty inches of water''? And what goes wrong when I complain that ''*all the ants in my kitchen are numerous''? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, distributivity, and collectivity. This paper provides a unified perspective on these domains and gives a single answer to the questions above in the framework of algebraic event semantics.
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Explores the formal characterization of boundedness in predicates, crucial for distinguishing atelic from telic items in linguistic semantics.
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The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics
Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semanti...
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Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification (Beaver & Condoravdi, 2007), for classical accounts of negation (Krifka, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination (Lasersohn, 1995). This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs denote existential quantifiers over events. Quantificational arguments can then be given a semantic account, negation can be treated classically, and coordination can be modeled as intersection. The framework presented here is a natural choice for researchers and fieldworkers who wish to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without being forced to make commitments about the hierarchical order of arguments, the argument-adjunct distinction, the default scope of quantifiers, or the nature of negation and coordination.
Ten men and women got married today: noun coordination and the intersective theory of conjunction
The word "and" can be used both intersectively, as in "John lies and cheats", and collectively, a...
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The word "and" can be used both intersectively, as in "John lies and cheats", and collectively, as in "John and Mary met". Research has tried to determine which one of these two meanings is basic. Focusing on coordination of nouns ("liar and cheat"), this paper argues that the basic meaning of "and" is intersective. This theory has been successfully applied to coordination of other kinds of constituents (Partee and Rooth, 1983; Winter, 2001). Certain cases of collective coordination ("cat and dog", "men and women") are considered a challenge for this view, and for this reason the collective theory has been argued to be superior (Heycock and Zamparelli, 2005). The main result of this paper is that the intersective theory actually predicts the collective behavior of "and" in these cases, due to the way it interacts with certain silent operators involving set minimization and choice functions. These operators are believed to be present in the grammar on the basis of phenomena involving indefinites and collective predicates, and they have been argued to cause collective interpretations in coordinations of noun phrases (Winter, 2001). This paper also shows that the collective theory does not generalize to coordinations of noun phrases in the way it was suggested by its proponents.
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The article advocates for the intersective theory, asserting it predicts collective interpretations, challenging previous assumptions.
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Mereology (handbook article)
(Coauthored with Manfred Krifka) This review article is concerned with the applications that mere...
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(Coauthored with Manfred Krifka) This review article is concerned with the applications that mereology has found in natural-language semantics. After a section on essential formal properties of the parthood relations and their axiomatization, we deal with linguistic applications in the nominal domain, in the expression of measurement functions, and in the verbal domain.
Overt distributivity in algebraic event semantics
This is the second in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semant...
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This is the second in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic phenomenon of distributivity in natural language. This paper describes and explains observable cross-linguistic differences in overt distributive items in the framework of Neo-Davidsonian algebraic event semantics. The previous paper, Champollion 2016, postulated two covert distributivity operators, D and Part, in the grammar, even though the semantic effects of D can be subsumed under the workings of Part. This paper motivates the split by arguing that distance-distributive items across languages are in essence overt versions of these operators. For example, English 'each' lexicalizes D while German 'jeweils' lexicalizes Part. For this reason, 'jeweils' occurs in a wider range of distributive environments, including distribution over salient occasions. The proposed analysis explains why distributive items that can also be used as determiners, such as 'each' and 'every', never allow distribution over occasions. It also accounts for the ability of these determiners to take part in cumulative readings and to interact with nondistributive event modifiers. The paper and its companion include an explicit proposal for the compositional process in event semantics.
Covert distributivity in algebraic event semantics
This is the first in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semanti...
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This is the first in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic phenomenon of distributivity in natural language. This paper investigates and formalizes different sources of covert distributivity. Apart from lexical distributivity effects, which are modeled by meaning postulates, phrasal distributivity is captured via two covert operators: (i) a D operator distributing over atoms only (Link 1987), and (ii) a cover-based Part operator, which can also distribute over non-atomic pluralities under contextual licensing (Schwarzschild 1996). The resulting theory surpasses accounts in which nonatomic distributivity is freely available, or not available at all; furthermore, it correctly predicts differences between lexical and phrasal nonatomic distributivity. D and Part are reformulated in Neo-Davidsonian algebraic event semantics, so that they apply to event predicates and make the sum event available for further modification by arguments and adjuncts. This paves the way for an account of the context-dependency of distributivity phenomena under for-adverbials, which improves on theories that predict indefinites to either always or never covary with for-adverbials. The paper and its companion include an explicit proposal for the compositional process in event semantics.
Distributivity, collectivity, and cumulativity (handbook article)
This handbook article provides an overview of the major empirical phenomena discussed in connecti...
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This handbook article provides an overview of the major empirical phenomena discussed in connection with the theoretical concepts of distributivity, collectivity, and cumulativity. Topics include: an operational definition of distributivity; the difference between lexical and phrasal distributivity; atomic vs. nonatomic distributivity; collectivity and thematic entailments; two classes of collective predicates ("be numerous" vs. "gather"); how to distinguish between cumulative and collective readings; interactions of distributivity and collectivity; and a list of other relevant review papers and handbook articles.
Integrating Montague semantics and event semantics (ESSLLI lecture notes)
Lecture notes for the ESSLLI 2014 course (http://www.esslli2014.info/program/week-one/course-11)....
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Lecture notes for the ESSLLI 2014 course (
). -- It is sometimes believed that the marriage of (Neo-)Davidsonian event semantics and Montague semantics is an uneasy one. And indeed, in many implementations of event semantics, standard treatments of scope-taking elements such as quantifiers, negation, conjunctions, modals, etc. are complicated compared to the simple accounts they get in semantics textbooks. A typical graduate Semantics I course will introduce students to the main idea and motivation of event semantics, and will then go on to describe phenomena like quantification and negation in an event-free framework. While specialists who wish to combine the two frameworks will know where to look for ideas, there are currently no easy-to-use, off-the-shelf systems that puts the two together, textbook-style. An aspiring semanticist might be discouraged by this situation, particularly when a given language or phenomenon that seems to be well-suited to event semantics also involves scope-taking elements that need to be analyzed in some way. For example, event semantics is a natural choice for a fieldworker who wishes to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without making commitments as to the relative hierarchical order of arguments or the argument-adjunct distinction. Yet the same fieldworker would face significant technical challenges before being able to also use such standard tools as generalized quantifier theory or classical negation when encountering quantifiers and negation. This course aims to remedy this situation. After reviewing the basic empirical motivations for event semantics and for Montague semantics, we will review two influential but arguably problematic proposals by Krifka and Landman on how to combine the two frameworks, as well as a novel implementation of event semantics that combines with standard treatments of scope-taking elements in a well-behaved way. -- Identical to the NASSLLI 2014 course lecture notes (
) except for typo corrections and some added reccommended readings.
Reply to Roger Schwarzschild on event semantics
I reply to various aspects of Roger Schwarzschild’s note "Distributivity, negation and quantifica...
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I reply to various aspects of Roger Schwarzschild’s note "Distributivity, negation and quantification in event semantics: Recent work by L. Champollion." Section 2 shows that sum distributivity as used in lingbuzz/002097 and lingbuzz/002098 is a notational variant of a certain kind of distributivity that uses universal quantifiers and existential quantification over covers. Section 3 considers whether the treatment of "each" in lingbuzz/002098 is compatible with the event semantic framework in lingbuzz/001355. Section 4 attempts to clarify the relation between the accounts of for-adverbials in lingbuzz/001355 and lingbuzz/002097 and answers some questions raised by Schwarzschild. Section 5 amends the treatment of adnominal "each" in lingbuzz/002098 Version 2 (6/9/14), accepts that its scope includes the verb, and considers the consequences for the syntactic structure of double object constructions and prepositional datives.
Algebraic semantics and mereology (lecture notes)
Expressions like "John and Mary" or "the water in my cup" intuitively involve reference to collec...
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Expressions like "John and Mary" or "the water in my cup" intuitively involve reference to collections of individuals or substances. The parthood relation between these collections and their components is not modeled in standard formal semantics of natural language (Montague 1974; Heim and Kratzer 1998), but it takes central stage in what is known as algebraic or mereological semantics (Link 1998; Krifka 1998; Landman 1996, 2000). This course provides a gentle introduction into the mathematical framework of classical extensional mereology, and is designed to help students understand important issues in the following problem domains, all of them active areas of research: plural, mass reference, measurement, aspect, and distributivity. In particular, the course shows how mereology sheds light on cross-categorial similarities between oppositions that pervade these domains, such as the count-mass, singular-plural, telic-atelic, and collective-distributive opposition. Students encounter issues involving natural language metaphysics and philosophy of language, and how these issues interact with semantic theory depending on how they are resolved. Much of the important seminal work in the area has been done in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Link, Krifka, Landman). More recently, significant new applications have cropped up, ranging from the influence of verbal semantics on cumulativity (e.g. Kratzer 2007) to the grammar of measurement (Schwarzschild 2006) to dependent plurals (Zweig 2009). The mereological perspective has kept opening up important new avenues for research across the decades (Kratzer 2007; Williams 2009). It has proven particularly useful in drawing out cross-categorial generalizations. Examples include recent work on pluractionality in Kaqchikel and its relation to group nouns (Henderson 2012), and my own work on a unified theory of distributivity, aspect and measurement (Champollion 2010). The mereological approach also provides a useful backdrop against which recent degree-semantic approaches to aspectual composition (Piñón 2008; Chris Kennedy 2012) and aspectual coercion (Deo and Piñango 2011) can be evaluated. In the first half of this course, I present introductions into algebraic semantics and selected applications involving plural, mass reference, measurement, aspect, and distributivity. I discuss issues involving ontology and philosophy of language, and how these issues interact with semantic theory depending on how they are resolved. The second half of this course develops strata theory, originally published in my dissertation (Champollion 2010) and essentially unchanged from that source. Lecture 8, on the scopal behavior of for-adverbials, is further elaborated on in Champollion (2013, 2014a). The latter paper also develops the theory of distributivity presented in Lecture 4. Lecture 9, on distance-distributivity, is based on Champollion (2012, 2014c).
Back to events: More on the logic of verbal modification
This paper shows that Davidsonian event semantics is compatible with a robust theory of quantific...
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This paper shows that Davidsonian event semantics is compatible with a robust theory of quantification, and focuses on the relation between quantificational event semantics (Champollion, 2010, 2014) and linking semantics, an event-free theory of verbal and temporal modification proposed by Beaver and Condoravdi (2007). The system presented here provides a clean and compositional account of the interaction of events and quantifiers, and improves on linking semantics by accounting for the entailment behavior of verbal modification in terms of logical consequence. In conjunction with a modular dynamic treatment of binding along the lines of Barker and Shan (2014) and Charlow (2014), the system further improves on quantificational event semantics and on linking semantics as a model of temporal modification and temporal anaphora.
Parts of a whole: Distributivity as a bridge between aspect and measurement
Why can I tell you that I 'ran for five minutes' but not that I '*ran to the store for five minut...
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Why can I tell you that I 'ran for five minutes' but not that I '*ran to the store for five minutes'? Why can you say that there are 'five pounds of books' in this package if it contains several books, but not '*five pounds of book' if it contains only one? What keeps you from using '*sixty degrees of water' to tell me the temperature of the water in your pool when you can use 'sixty inches of water' to tell me its height? And what goes wrong when I complain that '*all the ants in my kitchen are numerous'?
The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this talk, I will give an overview of my dissertation, which provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of mereological semantics, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature. A generalized notion of distributivity is proposed and formalized as a parametrized higher-order property called stratified reference: a predicate that holds of a certain entity or event is required to also hold of its parts along a certain dimension and down to a certain granularity. The dimension parameter is a thematic role in the case of 'each' and 'all', a measure function in the case of pseudopartitives, and time or space in the case of 'for'-adverbials. The granularity parameter involves pure atoms in the case of 'each', pure and impure atoms in the case of 'all', and very small amounts of space, time, or matter in the cases of pseudopartitives and 'for'-adverbials. Stratified reference is used to formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above. The constraint is exploited to improve on existing characterizations of distributivity, atelicity, and monotonicity of measurement.
The framework results in a new take on the minimal-parts problem that occurs in the study of atelic predicates and mass terms. It scales up successfully from temporal to spatial aspect, and it explains why pseudopartitives and other distributive constructions are sensitive to the difference between intensive and extensive measure functions. It provides a fresh view on atomic and cover-based theories of quantificational distributivity. The framework is also used to account for the scopal behavior of 'all' and of 'for'-adverbials with respect to cumulative quantification and dependent plurals. Together with a novel theory of collective predication, the framework also provides an account of the differences between such predicates as 'be numerous' and 'gather' as they interact with 'all'.
The Penn Lambda Calculator: Pedagogical Software for Natural Language Semantics
by
Lucas Champollion
and
Joshua Tauberer
This paper describes a novel pedagogical software program that can be seen as an online companion...
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This paper describes a novel pedagogical software program that can be seen as an online companion to one of the standard textbooks of formal natural language semantics, Heim and Kratzer (1998). The Penn Lambda Calculator is a multifunctional application designed for use in standard graduate and undergraduate introductions to formal semantics: Teachers can use the application to demonstrate complex semantic derivations in the classroom and modify them interactively, and students can use it to work on problem sets provided by the teacher. The program supports demonstrations and exercises in two main areas: (1) performing beta reduction in the simply typed lambda calculus; (2) application of the bottom-up algorithm for computing the compositional semantics of natural language syntax trees. The program is able to represent the full range of phenomena covered in the Heim and Kratzer textbook by function application, predicate modification, and lambda abstraction. This includes phenomena such as intersective adjectives, relative clauses and quantifier raising. In the student use case, emphasis has been placed on providing "live" feedback for incorrect answers. Heuristics are used to detect the most frequent student errors and to return specific, interactive suggestions.
Quantification and negation in event semantics
Recently, it has been claimed that event semantics does not go well together with quantification,...
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Recently, it has been claimed that event semantics does not go well together with quantification, especially if one rejects syntactic, LF-based approaches to quantifier scope. This paper shows that such fears are unfounded, by presenting a simple, variable-free framework which combines a Neo-Davidsonian event semantics with a type-shifting based account of quantifier scope. The main innovation is that the event variable is bound inside the verbal denotation, rather than at sentence level by existential closure. Quantifiers can then be interpreted in situ. The resulting framework combines the strengths of event semantics and type-shifting accounts of quantifiers and thus does not force the semanticist to posit either a default underlying word order or a syntactic LF-style level. It is therefore well suited for applications to languages where word order is free and quantifier scope is determined by surface order. As an additional benefit, the system leads to a straightforward account of negation, which has also been claimed to be problematic for event-based frameworks.
Cumulative readings of "every" do not provide evidence for events and thematic roles
An argument by Kratzer (2000) based on Schein (1986, 1993) does not conclusively show that events...
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An argument by Kratzer (2000) based on Schein (1986, 1993) does not conclusively show that events and thematic roles are necessary ingredients of the logical representation of natural language sentences. The argument claims that cumulative readings of "every" can be represented only with these ingredients. But scope-splitting accounts make it possible to represent cumulative readings of "every" in an eventless framework. Such accounts are motivated by obligatory reconstruction  effects of "every" and by crosslinguistic considerations. Kratzer proposes that "agent" but not "theme" occurs in the logical representation of sentences because this allows her to model subject-object asymmetries in the distribution of cumulative every. But the reason for these asymmetries seems to be that every must be c-commanded by another quantifier in order to cumulate with it, no matter what its thematic role is. So the distribution of cumulative "every" does not provide support for Kratzer’s proposal.
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Cumulative readings of 'every' can be captured without events or thematic roles, refuting Schein's intricate argument for their necessity.
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Bidirectional dependency parsing trained on the Turin University Treebank
by
Lucas Champollion
Livio Robaldo
, and
Prashanth Mannem
In this paper, we describe the application of a bidirectional dependency parser trained on the Tu...
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In this paper, we describe the application of a bidirectional dependency parser trained on the Turin University Treebank.
On the (ir)relevance of psycholinguistics for anaphora resolution
Psycholinguistic experiments show that pronouns tend to be resolved differently depending on whet...
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Psycholinguistic experiments show that pronouns tend to be resolved differently depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses. If a pronoun in a subordinate clause has more than one potential antecedent in the main clause, then the pronoun tends to refer to the antecedent which has a certain thematic role (depending on the verb and on the subordinating conjunction). In contrast, pronouns in main clauses tend to refer back to the subject of the previous main clause, and this tendency is not affected by any verbs or conjunctions. In natural language processing, these findings have recently led to a proposal that pronoun resolution systems should have a split architecture, i.e. that they should use different mechanisms for pronoun resolution in the two cases.
With the help of two parsed and coreference-annotated corpora, this paper estimates the impact of the split-architecture proposal. The findings of this work are as follows: (1) Subject pronouns in authentic texts behave the same way in main and subordinate clauses. (2) The number of sentences in which a split architecture would behave differently than a system that treats both cases the same way is close to zero. Therefore, a separate treatment of resolution within and across units is unlikely to improve the performance of any system. This result casts a doubt on the split-architecture proposal, and more generally on approaches that directly incorporate psycholinguistic results into performance-oriented algorithms for anaphora resolution without assessing the relative importance of the phenomena that underlie them.
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Miltsakaki's model fails to account for real-world data; only 7 sentences met criteria for semantic focusing, challenging its utility in NLP applications.
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Each vs. jeweils: A cover-based view on distance-distributivity
Zimmermann (2002) identifies two kinds of distance-distributive items across languages. The first...
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Zimmermann (2002) identifies two kinds of distance-distributive items across languages. The first kind (e.g. each) is restricted to distribution over individuals; the second kind (e.g. German jeweils) can also be interpreted as distributing over salient occasions. I explain this behavior by formally relating this split to the two distributivity operators proposed in the work of Link (atomic operator) and Schwarzschild (cover-based operator), which I reformulate in a Neo-Davidsonian framework.
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