(image source: University of Massachusetts, Amherst.)
Exploring Semantics, Modality, and Cross-Linguistic Insights: A Conversation with Professor Angelica Karza
The Oxford University Linguistic Society recently hosted its final event of the academic year, featuring a fascinating session with Professor Angelica Karza, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and uploaded it on YouTube. Her talk offered deep insights into the nature of semantics, modality, cross-linguistic variation, and the evolving landscape of linguistic research.
Here are some of the highlights from this illuminating discussion.
What Is Semantics?
When asked to define semantics, Professor Karza described it as both a broad and challenging field. She focuses primarily on the truth-conditional content of meaning, the conditions under which a declarative sentence like “The grass is green” is true.
One way to test understanding of such a sentence is through a thought experiment: presenting a slideshow of possible scenarios and asking whether the sentence accurately describes each one. A person who identifies the correct situations demonstrates comprehension.
Beyond declaratives, semantics also encompasses questions, commands, exclamations, and even utterances like “Oops” or “Hooray”. The study of meaning, she explained, extends across multiple dimensions, truth-conditional, conventionalized emotional content, and beyond, much like the multiple voices in a musical score.
The Importance of Cross-Linguistic Data
Professor Karza emphasized that cross-linguistic investigation is crucial to modern semantics. Through work published in journals like Natural Language Semantics and conferences such as SULA (Semantics of Underrepresented Languages in the Americas) and its sister AAA conference for Asian, African, and Austronesian languages, linguists have explored meaning across diverse, often under-studied languages.
This work requires rigorous fieldwork techniques for collaborating with language consultants, akin to experimental methods used in child language acquisition studies. Such cross-linguistic research has revealed variations in phenomena like scope marking, modality, and causatives, highlighting both universality and diversity in human language.
Understanding Modality: Cognitive and Linguistic Perspectives
Modality, or the expression of possibilities, abilities, and necessity in language, links closely with cognition. Professor Karza explained it as the ability to reason about possible worlds from a limited piece of reality.
Forward-looking modality: Projects possibilities from a current anchor to potential futures, e.g., “I can finish this task by evening.”
Backward-looking (epistemic) modality: Infers possible pasts from current evidence, e.g., a historian deducing events from a relic.
Languages encode these modalities differently, classifying anchors, ranking possibilities, and qualifying outcomes (e.g., probability, desirability). These distinctions reveal both the psychological basis of modality and its linguistic diversity.
Situations, Events, and Semantic Representation
Professor Karza addressed the distinction between situation semantics and event semantics. She described events as particular types of situations, individuated by verbs or adjectives, and characterized by minimal but relevant properties. For example, a swimming event contains only the person swimming, without unrelated elements like the swimming pool or spectators.
She also touched on the relationship between public language and I-language (internal linguistic representation). While languages are shared socially, individual representations in the brain vary, much like individual hearts vary while still allowing generalizable medical theories.
Revisiting Conditionals and Causatives
Professor Karza challenged traditional views on conditionals. Rather than treating “if…then” as a simple two-place operator, she proposed analyzing conditionals in contexts where overt operators (like probability or necessity) are present, with bare conditionals being limiting cases.
Her work on causatives explored constructions like “I drank the teapot dry”, highlighting the need for tight causal relations between actions and results. She proposed ways to model these constructions cognitively and cross-linguistically, though she acknowledges ongoing challenges and open questions.
Referential Semantics and Truth Conditions
A long-standing debate in semantics concerns truth-conditional versus referential approaches. Professor Karza aligns with referential semantics, inspired by thinkers like David Lewis, while recognizing that other approaches, such as those advocated by Davidson or Petrovsky, prioritize syntactic rules without assigning denotations to all expressions.
For her, the key is empirical content, the ability to capture observable patterns in meaning, rather than philosophical allegiance to one framework.
The Evolution of Semantics
Over her career, Professor Karza has witnessed significant shifts in semantics:
Cross-linguistic semantics has grown tremendously, moving beyond Indo-European languages.
Multi-dimensional meaning representation, akin to a musical score with multiple voices, now captures truth conditions, focus, scalar implicatures, and conventionalized emotional content.
Cognitive connections and experimental methods are increasingly integrated, bridging semantics with psychology and cognitive science.
Professor Karza’s talk highlighted the dynamic, multi-layered nature of semantics—from formal truth conditions to cognitive representations and cross-linguistic diversity. Her reflections remind us that understanding meaning requires a blend of linguistic theory, cognitive insight, and empirical rigor.
As semantics continues to evolve, incorporating cross-linguistic data, experimental techniques, and multi-dimensional meaning, the field remains as vibrant and challenging as ever.
References & Further Reading:
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986, 1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition.
Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics.
Lewis, D., & Keenan, E. L. (1975). Adverbs of quantification. In Formal Semantics of Natural Language (pp. 3–15). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matthewson, L. (1998). On The Interpretation of Wide-scope Indefinites. Natural Language Semantics, 7, 79-134.
Karza, A., & Collaborators. Semantics of Underrepresented Languages in the Americas (SULA).
