OASIS 5

OASIS: Thanks for talking with us. What's your favorite ontological entity and why?

FM: I think it's states that depend on actions. For instance, if someone was nice when I talked with them, they were in a state of niceness during our conversation, but perhaps they are in fact not nice at all as a person, and this state they manifest can’t easily be seen as an instantiation of something more general, like usually the case with dispositions. The same with abilities: it can happen to each of us to be able once to do something while we wouldn’t say we have the ability to do this thing.    This ontological dependence that characterizes these fluctuant states is very interesting - they seem to exist only through an action. This is not typical of states, and because of this, these predicates have a lot of interesting aspectual and other semantic properties across languages.

OASIS: What is everyone wrong about?

FM: A lot of linguists still think that agents need to be animate. It's easier to admit machines as agents, and maybe teleologically capable entities in the sense of Folli and Harley, like teakettles, which maybe are similar to machines.  But even inanimates that are absolutely not instruments sometimes need to be treated as agents in the grammar. As Folli and Harley note, unergative verbs that require an agentive subject are sometimes compatible with non-instrumental inanimate subjects, so you need  to admit that in the grammar there is something like inanimate agents, and not only flowers, but also stones, or pieces of wood.  This is something that I really have to struggle with a lot in talks because people keep laughing when I say that you have problems if you assume that agents are always animate. But I will convince them!

OASIS: What is your favorite fact about a language other than English?

FM: It's a thing about Mandarin Chinese, you can detransitivize or at least use intransitively agentive verbs like eat. A famous example is The chicken ate, that can either mean to say that the chicken was eating but also that the chicken was eaten. I worked on these sentences with Hongyuan Sun and Hamida Dermidache and we call them "anti-agentives" as opposed to "anti-causatives" because the piece that is demoted is not a cause but rather an agent. Anti-agentive construals  are fascinating, because it’s often admitted that when a verb presupposes an agent, it has to be expressed, so Mandarin Chinese and apparently quite a few other languages prove this wrong.

OASIS: Tell us about a student you've learned something from.

FM: I would like to mention Zi Huang. I  met her when she was in Berlin for some time and she was working  on nominalizations and the linguistic expression of facts.  I discovered while writing on facts  an interesting handout from her. Before reading it, I was assuming that the difference between direct vs. indirect causation  can’t really characterize causation between facts, because facts being in a sense eternal and not located in time and space,  you can’t really say about two facts that  they are more or less temporally distant from each other, as you do with events. But in this hand-out she shows that, contrary to what I thought, facts can in fact be anchored in time - you can have temporal anchoring in a place where I didn't think you could have it. Which, in turn, means that it’s maybe not true after all that the direct vs. indirect distinction can’t apply at all to causation between facts.

OASIS: What's the most recent "aha" moment you have had?

FM: It's not the most recent one, but maybe the strongest one. It was at CHRONOS in Pisa, and there was a talk by Karoly Varasdi about the progressive, so he was telling us about indicative conditions and so on and I was so excited that I could barely stay seated.  I thought this is exactly what I need to characterize agentive causations, as opposed to non-agentive causations. I thought, I now need to rush and read this paper and write! But my daughter was still 1 year old so I wasn't able to do that so quickly! But I did write this paper and some years later, Karoly and his wife Zsofia Gyarmathy and I gave a course in Paris together, so it was a very inspiring work and a very inspiring collaboration.

OASIS: Who are your professional heroes?

FM: I have to think about all these people who did tremendous work but ended up leaving academia because they couldn't stand it anymore or could not find a job. I think about them often because I think about the exciting  papers they will never write. Karoly is one of them, Zsofia  as well, and there are many others, like Tillmann Pross or Galit Sassoon.  So they are my heroes. I also sometimes think, perhaps I’m wrong, that people tend to cite less those who left the field because they can’t reciprocate, which I find very sad and unfair, so I hope I’m wrong!

OASIS: How old were you when you discovered linguistics? What made you interested in it?

FM: When I was about 8, my mother blamed me for claiming that quelque can be used in the singular form  in French, and I got very upset because I was sure that you could use it. It's actually a little old fashioned, but she was strict that I was making a mistake. A similar thing happened in an English class - I used emphatic do before a verb and I lost a point on a test because the teacher couldn't imagine that I would use this emphatic do, and probably thought it was an example of spurious do, which exists in L2 English! In fact, I ended up working on spurious do and its relation to emphatic do,  and I have a paper coming up in Glossa about it. So this is my revenge on this teacher! Maybe this is how I started thinking as a linguist, to get really upset at people trying to shrink your possibilities in language use, and thinking that because you are in primary school, you can’t be aware of emphatic do as an L2 speaker.

OASIS: Tell us how your career turned out in an unexpected way.

FM: I was supposed to prepare a PhD in metrics - metrics of Emile Verhaeren, who is a Belgian poet. In the end the professor did not get the grant that would have supported it, but  that was the career that was originally planned for me. Years later, maybe I made a mistake, when I had to choose the topic of my dissertation. I did first a licence in Romance philology, but then there was a new track in linguistics and I went back to study, and at some point I had to choose between different topics for a PhD project. I considered asking Didier Demolin to prepare a PhD project on the different prosodic realizations of oui and non in French, so something at the interface between prosody,  semantics and pragmatics, but in the end I didn't do that - that would have been so much fun to write that dissertation!

OASIS: Thanks for answering our questions. See you in Edinburgh!

FM: You're very welcome. Yes, see you there!

OASIS: Thanks for sitting down with us. What's your favorite ontological entity and why?

TQ: I really like possible worlds, because I work with them, and also from a psychological perspective, they seem crazy. If a linguist explains to a psychologist how necessity and possibility are operationalized, the psychologist will say you are crazy because this idea that we are quantifying over all possible worlds, from a psychological perspective, this can't be the way the brain works, you'd have to run an infinite computation to do that. Yet arguably this is the most elegant theory of modality that we have. But sometimes the best theory is a crazy theory.

OASIS: So what do you do when a theory is crazy in one domain and elegant in another?

TQ: In psychology what we like to do is to take the crazy theory, and come up with ways the brain could approximate that computation. It's hard to do, but sometimes you can come up with experimental predictions to test those ideas about how the brain approximates it.

OASIS: Tell us how your career trajectory turned out in an unexpected way.

TQ: When I started my PhD, I was very interested in moral psychology. So I would read all these papers about the trolley problem, for example. When I started to dive into the topic, I began to get interested in why intentional actions are somehow morally worse. This idea that if someone hurts you accidentally, you might be willing to forgive them. But if someone hurts you intentionally, you'll find that that's worse, maybe it's harder to forgive them.

And so this led me to ask, what do we actually mean by doing something intentionally? I came up with this theory, maybe it has to do with the way we represent the causal relationships between what's in our mind and what's in the world. But then, once I was there, I had to study how the mind represents causation. So I started working on that. But then there are all these theories about how causal reasoning relies on counterfactual thinking. So I also ended up working on counterfactual reasoning.

In sum, the history of a lot of my research is diving deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole, where you get into more and more abstract concepts.

When I started, I thought I would do very traditional moral psychology research. But I got a little bit frustrated by the state of the field, because there was not as much theory as I wanted. This seems to be a general concern in a lot of psychological research.

OASIS: Hmm. Why is this?

TQ: Somewhat paradoxically, psychologists are not well-trained to think about things in terms of computations. It's very easy to rely on folk psychology and intuitions about it and work like that.

OASIS: Do you work step by step or follow hunches (or neither, or both)? Explain?

TQ: I very much tend to follow hunches. There is this idea in the research world that you need a research program and you need to work on it consistently. No matter how hard I try to work on one thing, I always seem to have a side project, something that pops up, and it's very hard not to follow it. Very often my best ideas happen when I read something that is completely outside of my current research interests, I get an insight that I feel might be novel or interesting.

OASIS: Tell us about a mentor you'd particularly like to pay tribute to.

TQ: I did my PhD with Leda Cosmides and the late John Tooby. In their lab, people use an evolutionary approach to psychology…

OASIS: …What does that mean?

TQ: What this means is that you're basically doing evolutionary biology blended with cognitive psychology. And so in practice, this means thinking a lot about the evolutionary function of cognitive mechanisms.

In a lot of research labs, the PI works on Topic X and everyone in the lab is more or less expected to work on Topic X. Their lab was not like that at all. There was this expectation that if you follow an evolutionary approach, you can take an evolutionary perspective on any topic in psychology, and you can make progress on that. And so I had previous labmates who worked on things as diverse as logical reasoning, spatial navigation, visual attention, moral psychology, and so on.

So when I ended up working on causal cognition, which is something no one else in the lab had done before, this was totally ok.

OASIS: Was it lonely? Did you feel sufficiently supported in that topic?

TQ: I had to do a lot of reading on my own. But there was a lot of support, both from my mentors, and from other people in the lab, discussing the ideas. So overall I think it's a really great place, a really great atmosphere to be doing research.

OASIS: Tell us about a student you've learned something from.

TQ: I'm working with Can Konuk who is a student at ENS in Paris. We've been working on causal cognition together with Salvador Mascarenhas. Many people in the field of causal cognition are working with symbolic Bayesian models. And we tend to be sceptical of neural networks and connectionist approaches. But Can at the moment is working onwith a new theory that does use neural networks. And I think he makes a good case that they can be useful and they can hold interesting insights, for those of us working on causal cognition.

OASIS: Thanks for your thoughts! See you in Edinburgh.

TQ: Thanks!

OASIS: Thanks for joining us for an interview. What's your favorite ontological entity and why?

RZ: I have a weak spot for subkinds...😍 My advisor was Greg Carlson, who wrote one of the PhD theses with the longest lasting influence in semantics. And I have always been fascinated by the different ways languages use to refer to “kinds of things”. Why SUBkinds, then? Because we seem to be very good at switching from token-talk to kind-talk (think of what we are really saying in “Every car sold in the US undergoes thorough crash tests”) and because we can break kinds down into subkinds in many ways, which cannot really be counted together (“??There are two kinds of dog in that room: a guard dog and a German Shepard” — an old example from Carlson). I am also intrigued by their anaphoric properties: after a previous mention we can pick up tokens with “the” (“a dog came in… the dog…”) but it takes a demonstrative to pick up a kind (“Dogs are common … this type of pets …”). Why? As far as I know, nobody has a comprehensive theory.  

OASIS: What is everybody wrong about?

RZ: We spend a lot of time folding structures in intricate ways and not enough smoothing the folds into workable trees -- in a principled way! I have been working in correlative constructions lately, and there is a lot of evidence that they involve elaborate movements of structures and remnants, which create left-expanding structures. Put a few of these together, as in “Both Sinner and Alcaraz have both challenged and defeated both Djokovic and Federer” and you get a structure which makes Baroque churches look like Ikea tables. There must be a way where structures which are the result of complex movements are simplified (one word could be “reanalyzed”, but it has a whiff of performance deficits that I don’t like), and nobody talks about this!

OASIS: Who are your professional heroes?

RZ: Carlson, Kayne, Steedman. Boring, you could say! But they are truly great linguists, by which I mean people capable of seeing data under everybody eyes in a completely different light, of convincing you (at least for a while..) that everything you thought of as established is wrong; of showing that there is a way to reconcile the computational implementation of a linguistic theory with the idea that it should provide real insight on what is possible in the human mind. We need more people like them, but they don’t come frequently.

OASIS: What would you like to tell students/early career researchers?

RZ: Don't just use ChatGPT, keep both eyes open on what people (painstakingly) discover about how it works. Theoretical linguists cannot afford to ignore computational ones, and they_CL need us_TL even when they think they don't. There is a lot of ground to cover before CL starts to approximate a model of the human language faculty – the size and manner of training is too diverse, the output too inconsistent, superhuman in some corners, baboon-level in others. But as methodologies start to align, we could definitely use computational models. Also, mapping network states with brain states is a fast growing subfield, and it could become very interesting.  

OASIS: Tell us how your career trajectory turned out in an unexpected way.

RZ: I wallow in detours. I started university studying modern Italian literature, ended up getting a degree in psycholinguistics after a stint with formal logic. In the US I studied with Tom Bever, a psycholinguist, but graduated with Carlson. Later, I have mostly worked on the syntax-semantics interface, but my most cited article is one with Marco Baroni in computational linguistics. I have created physical educational games of syntax and online games to collect prosodic data. All this not because I am particularly smart, only because I am incredibly curious and equally incredibly easily distracted. What was your question, by the way?

OASIS: Do you work step by step or follow hunches (or neither, or both)? Explain?

RZ: Hunches, often under the shower, then I search for the flow. The shower is the easy part.

OASIS: Tell us about a student you've learned something from.

RZ: Doing cognitive science, it happens weekly. Lastly, Dota Dong and Giulia Li Calzi --- little suns made into people. Often, it involves computational techniques they have picked up elsewhere, or ideas on where to apply them. I have been lucky enough to be on the thesis committee of many interesting people, and I learned a lot from them.

OASIS: Your PhD thesis in six words.

RZ: Noun phrase cartography meets compositional semantics.

OASIS: Thanks for talking with us. Looking forward to seeing you in Edinburgh!

RZ: Looking forward to being there!