FASS Research Profile – Ash Asudeh – Resuming the Debate on Resumption

Ash Asudeh’s path to becoming a professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at Carleton University was rather unique.

Born in Iran, he lived in Cambridge, England, during his young childhood years.  From England, his family moved to Norway and it wasn’t until the early eighties that Asudeh and his family took the trip across the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Ottawa, the city where he would become the first recipient of the undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at Carleton University.

Upon his graduation from Carleton in 1996, Asudeh would return to Europe for his Master of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, which he attended on a Commonwealth Scholarship.

Finally, after achieving his master’s, Asudeh would cross the Atlantic one more time; this time to complete his formal education in California at Stanford University on a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and a Whiting Fellowship. At Stanford, he would focus much of his research on the relationship between syntax (language structure) and semantics (language meaning).

Exactly 10 years after completing his undergrad, Asudeh made his return to Carleton University in 2006. As a member of the Logic, Language and Information Lab at Carleton (llilab.carleton.ca) and a professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, Asudeh has a myriad of research interests including semantics, pragmatics, syntax, cognitive science, linguistic theories and grammatical architecture, language and logic, computational linguistics and psycholinguistics.

With the assistance of a FASS Research Award, Asudeh recently completed and published his monograph, entitled The Logic of Pronominal Resumption.  The Logic of Pronominal Resumption — which is a thoroughly revised version of Asudeh’s Stanford doctoral thesis — investigates the fundamental issue in semantic theory: ‘compositionality’.

Compositionality concerns how the meanings of the parts of an expression, where the parts are smaller expressions or ultimately words, are used to compute the meanings of the expression in its entirety. The key intuition behind compositionality is that certain expressions can be thought of as missing parts that are completed by other expressions.

The Logic of Pronominal Resumption investigates a particular phenomenon – found in languages such as Irish, Hebrew, and Swedish (a language Asudeh is fluent in) – in which a ‘resumptive pronoun’ apparently completes an expression that needs to remain incomplete in order to combine with another expression. Resumptive pronouns are thus a problem for compositionality. For example, the Irish equivalent of ‘the man to whom you gave the money’ is the equivalent of ‘the man that you gave the money to him’. However, ‘you gave the money to him’ is a fully complete sentence and it is therefore puzzling, from the perspective of standard theories of compositionality, how it could be predicated of a subject in, e.g., ‘James is the man that you gave the money to him’. Normally, this can only be accomplished if the meaning of ‘James’ completes the information contributed as the meaning of ‘to’, but the pronoun seems to illicitly be doing this instead.

Asudeh emphasizes the importance of resolving the tension behind compositionality and resumption, because, as he explains, resumption is not uncommon in the world’s languages.

“Resumption is a relatively common phenomenon and furthermore occurs in languages that are not historically related, such as Irish and Hebrew. It therefore must reflect some kind of deep fact about the human language capacity. In addition to expanding our understanding of the relationship between syntax and semantics, resumption gives insight into the relationship between morphology (word formation and the forms of words) and syntax and semantics, because in language after language that displays resumption, the resumptive forms are just ordinary pronominal forms.”

Another reason this book is important:  it is the first major monograph devoted to the process of resumption in more than thirty years.  Asudeh is keeping his fingers crossed that this publication will get people talking about this revealing topic.

“I hope that the Logic of Pronominal Resumption will renew interest in the topic and, through its use of computational logic and its proposal of a processing model for resumption, further strengthen the ties between linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology, thus contributing to cognitive science.”

Asudeh is already engaged in two other major projects. He and Professor Ida Toivonen (ICS/SLaLS) are working with Professor Joan Bresnan (Stanford) and Professor Stephen Wechsler (University of Texas, Austin) on the second edition of Bresnan’s influential advanced syntax textbook, to be published by Wiley-Blackwell later in the year.

He is also working on a project with Dr. Gianluca Giorgolo, a postdoctoral fellow in ICS, on applying concepts from category theory, a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science, to certain problems at the interface between semantics and pragmatics.

For now, it is Asudeh’s wish that his monograph will get people to resume the debate on pronominal resumption.

For more information on Ash Asudeh

For more details on The Logic of Resumption