The first paper, led by Brown undergrad alum Nathaniel Scott '24, was jointly co-authored with Prof. Scott AnderBois as well Shen Aguinda (Comunidad Cofán Dureno) and Daniel Altshuler (Oxford). The paper, titled "Distributivity and coherence in clausal conjunction" examined variation in the meanings of words like "and" across languages and across different environments within a language, focusing on the conjunction tuya'kaen in A'ingae. It argues that a coherence-based approach to the pragmatics of conjunction, together with structural facts about A'ingae produces a complex pattern of both similarities and differences with more well-studied languages like English.

 

The second paper, presented by lead author undergraduate student Claire Robertson together with co-author Scott AnderBois was titled "The role of intentionality and enablement in associated motion". It presented one of the first formal semantic accounts of associated motion, a grammatical mechanism somewhat similar to English "go and V" that adds a motion event to the description of the event described by the main verb. The paper argues that associated motion gives rise to additional inferences regarding the relationship between the motion event and that contributed by the main verb and additionally communicates that the subject acted intentionally and provides a formal account deriving these inferences.