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| Research in Theoretical Linguistics Time, space, change, and causation are things that we expect to encounter in the study of the physical world, but the work of theoretical linguists over the last two decades has shown that these concepts also figure in the grammar of human language. These properties are encoded in the grammar of natural languages in particular ways, especially in the meanings of verbs, which can be described within a range of possible linguistic event structures that organize temporal, spatial, agentive, and causal elements of meaning within a kind of 'natural language theory of events'. This has been the focus of my initial research. Much of this research was focused on demonstrating the existence of some general aspectual constraints on the syntax/semantics interface (form/meaning interface). Certain temporal properties of the event described by a verb determine the syntactic properties of that verb and its arguments. This principle applies universally, across languages, and allows clear predictions to be made about universal versus language-particular aspects of the acquisition of verbs. In my current research, I am moving beyond the traditional notion of event structure towards an extended view of event structure, which includes the syntactic representation of 'mind', or the grammar of point of view. This encompasses such linguistic phenomena as the syntax of person, pronominal reference, logophoricity, psychological predicates, spatial and temporal deixis, evidential and evaluative predicates, modality, and the syntax/discourse interface. These all involve elements of linguistic meaning which must be evaluated relative to some sentient being. Whereas the aim of my work on the encoding of time and space in syntax was to uncover a 'natural language theory of events', the aim of my research on the interaction of point of view and syntax is to elucidate a 'natural language theory of mind'. The long-term goal for my research is to integrate these two elements of human grammar into a coherent theory. All of this work is motivated by a vision of a clean, spare, and articulated theory of syntax and its interfaces with meaning, including all the deictic elements of time, space and point of view. Natural Language Processing My working experience in natural language processing includes, among other things: trouble-shooting parsers, creating a context-free rule system for parsing Japanese, evaluating Japanese morphological parsers, analyzing linguistic content for improved named entity recognition, developing semantic annotation schemas for local domains in Japanese and English, developing algorithms for discovering ontologies. For more details see resume. |
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Carol L. Tenny Theoretical Linguistics and Natural Language Processing tenny@linguist.org |
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| Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky (eds.) 2002. Events as Grammatical Objects: The Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics, Logical Semantics and Syntax. Stanford: CSLI Publications , 400 pp. Introduction, "A History of Events in Linguistic Theory" by Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky. |
| Carol Tenny 1994. Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers , 245 pp. |
| Robert Berwick, Steven Abney, and Carol Tenny (eds.) 1991. Principle-Based Parsing: Computation and Psycholinguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers , 408 pp. |
| Teaching I have taught many graduate and undergraduate classes. One class that has garnered special attention is an undergraduate introduction to linguistics class I have developed. This was one of the featured courses at the Linguistic Society of America's 2004 poster session on teaching undergraduate linguistics. I have taught it at CMU under the name The Nature of Language. Our in-class fieldwork exercise was described in a CMU Focus article. Some excerpts from the poster session are below: > Orienting an introductory linguistics course towards an in-class hands-on fieldwork exercise > Some other ways to relate linguistics to immediate experience for an introductory class. > Life Experiments > Animal Communication Show > Sociolinguistics Exercise |
| Papers And So On "The interaction of clausal syntax, discourse roles, and information structure in questions" with Peggy Speas. Talk presented at Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Questions. European Society for Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLI), Nancy, France. 2004. Extended abstract. Handout. "Evidentiality, Experiencers, and the Syntax of Sentience in Japanese". 2006. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 15:245-288. "Short Distance Pronouns in Representational Noun Phrases and a Grammar of Sentience". ms. 2003. To appear. "Configurational properties of point of view roles" . 2003. With Peggy Speas. In Anna Maria Di Sciullo (ed.) Asymmetry in Grammar Volume 1: Syntax and semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 315-343. "Core events and adverbial modification" . 2000. In Tenny, C. and J. Pustejovsky (eds.) Events as Grammatical Objects. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 285-334. "Modification, event structure, and the word/phrase asymmetry" . 1998. With Anne-Marie DiSciullo. In Kusumoto, K. (ed.) Proceedings of NELS 28. GLSA: University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 375-389. "Psych verbs and verbal passives in Pittsburghese". 1998. Linguistics 36(3):591-597. "Modularity in Thematic versus Aspectual Licensing. Paths and moved objects in motion verbs". 1995. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 40(2):201-234. "How Motion Verbs are Special. The interaction of linguistic and pragmatic information in aspectual verb meanings". 1995. Pragmatics and Cognition. Vol. 3(1):31-73. "Aspectual Roles, Modularity and Acquisition; with a discussion of Contact Locatives". 1995. In Coopmans, P., M. Everaert, and J. Grimshaw (eds.) 2000. Lexical Specification and Insertion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 379-401. "The Aspectual Interface Hypothesis". 1992. In Lexical Matters. I. Sag and A. Szabolsci (eds.) Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 1-27. |
| Last updated: November 21, 2008 |