This interdisciplinary project builds on two complementary semantic traditions: 1) Formal semantics, a symbolic approach that can delimit and track linguistic referents, but does not adequately match them with the descriptive content of linguistic expressions; 2) Continuous approaches to language such as deep learning models and distributional semantics, which can handle descriptive content but do not associate it to individuated referents. AMORE synthesizes the two approaches into a unified, distributed (neural network) version of a formal semantic framework that is furthermore able to integrate perceptual (visual) and linguistic information about entities. AMORE advances our scientific understanding of language and its computational modeling, and contributes to the far-reaching debate between symbolic and continuous approaches to cognition with a proposal that falls clearly on the continuous camp, but integrates key insights from the symbolic camp.

The overall goal of this project is to take a fresh look at the articulation between conceptual and referential aspects of natural language meaning, based on the empirical results that have been obtained in our recent projects. Though the hypothesis that both conceptual and referential aspects play a crucial role in meaning composition is not new (similar views are relatively explicit e.g. in certain sectors of Discourse Representation Theory and in the Conceptual/Procedural Meaning distinction in Relevance Theory), the novelty of the project will most notably lie in 1) the incorporation of a distributional semantic perspective and 2) the use of diachronic evidence, still a very infrequent method in compositional semantic analysis.

This project tests a linguistic hypothesis on the cognitive function of grammatical organization in the brain in the context of clinical language patterns, in a cooperation between two language sciences departments (UPF and UB) and a clinical neuroimaging unit (FIDMAG). Language impairments have long been taken to inform inquiry into the biological basis of language, with a focus on aphasia following acquired lesions in left hemisphere perisylvian areas. Much less linguistic attention has been devoted to non-aphasic language impairments in clinical populations where language and cognitive dysfunction go hand in hand. In this project we continue to develop a linguistic framework that has motivated the comparative study of behavioural and neural language profiles in different cognitive disorders. Three behavioural and two neuroimaging studies, and one theoretical linguistic study are grouped into two subprojects. The theoretical project develops a typology of personal forms of reference across neurotypical and atypical cognitive profiles. The first behavioural study seeks to determine the performance of children with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) on a narrativity and a grammatical task; the second investigates the longitudinal relation between language development and learning from communication in a younger sample of children suspected of ASCs; the third is a comparative study of the grammatical profile of patients with schizophrenia with formal thought disorder (FTD) as compared with those without, patients with mania, and controls. The two neuroimaging studies are devoted to differences in language circuitry in the brain of patients with FTD and auditory verbal hallucinations. It is expected that our results will impact significantly on our understanding of the relation between language and cognition, making linguistics useful clinically as much as feeding rich comparative data on linguistic diversity into linguistic theory.

SIGN-HUB is a 4-year research project funded by the European Commission within Horizon 2020 Reflective Society 2015, Research and Innovation actions. This project, designed by a European research team, aims to provide the first comprehensive response to the societal and scientific challenge resulting from generalized neglect of the cultural and linguistic identity of signing Deaf communities in Europe. It will provide an innovative and inclusive resource hub for the linguistic, historical and cultural documentation of the Deaf communities' heritage and for sign language assessment in clinical intervention and school settings. To this end, it will create an open state-of-the-art digital platform with customized accessible interfaces. The project will initially feed that platform with core content in the following domains, expandable in the future to other sign languages: 

(i) digital grammars of 6 sign languages, produced with a new online grammar writing tool; 
(ii) an interactive digital atlas of linguistic structures of the world's sign languages; 
(iii) online sign language assessment instruments for education and clinical intervention, and 
(iv) the first digital archive of life narratives by elderly signers, subtitled and partially annotated for linguistic properties.

It is generally agreed that sentential information structure (IS) concerns context-sensitive aspects of meaning, but there is less agreement on how exactly context is to be brought into an analysis of the semantics of IS notions such as theme and rheme, contrast and background, focus, and topic. Core-IS adopts the radical view that there exist direct correlations between particular sentential IS categories and specific contextual resources. The overall aim of the project is to investigate these correlations building on recent models of dialogical context which provide richly structured representations inhabited by a limited set of contextual resources —ranked questions-under-discussion, salient sub-utterances, moves (basic discourse units with intentional and context-update effects), etc.— motivated independently on the basis of an array of interactive phenomena in natural language. Core-IS intends to map particular aspects of the connection between dialogical context and IS involving (a) the theme-rheme partition and questions under discussion, (b) focus/contrast and salient sub-utterances, and (c) topic and constituents in the move list. Light will be shed into issues such as the nature of question-answer congruence and the ontological connections between the categories of focus and rheme and between contrastive topic and the more general notion of (continuous/shifted) topic. On a more general theoretical plane, the results of Core-IS will hopefully further endorse the view that the dynamics of context and the interactive nature of linguistic communication are of the essence in linguistic interpretation.

This project seeks to identify linguistic phenomena in which the verb agrees with whatever constituent that ranks higher with respect to any language-specific prominence scale. The important aspect of this type of phenomenon is that the agreement features of the verb are not associated with any particular grammatical function, but solely depend on what constituents are part of the sentence.