Masoud Jasbi

Assistant Professor,
Department of Linguistics,
UC Davis

Function Words

Meet the billionaire class of words! A small group of extremely influential words like "the", "a", "and", "or","of", "to", and "not". They are the most frequent elements in every language and encode highly abstract meanings like negation, disjunction, numbers, and uniqueness. Why are function words so powerful?

Abstract Combinatorial Meaning

Function words encode abstract logical and combinatorial concepts such as negation, disjunction, numbers, and quantification. They are like the nuts and bolts that hold words, phrases, and sentences together making communication of complex thought possible.

Developmental Semantics

The abstract and combinatorial meanings of function words hold the key to understanding the primitives of human thought. My lab (the Logic, Language, & Learning Lab) studies the meanings of function words and how humans learn them. We combine insights from formal and theoretical semantics with experimental methods in psycholinguistics, and modeling techniques from computational linguistics and machine learning to address this overarching question.

Research
- Developmental Semantics/Pragmatics: How do abstract functional meanings emerge and develop in the child's mind?
- Theoretical & Experimental Semantics/Pragmatics: How much do languages vary in the ways they encode functional meaning?
- Open Science
  - Judgments of acceptability or grammaticality provided by trained linguists constitute a major and invaluable source of data for linguistic theories. However, the informal methods used for collecting and reporting them have received considerable criticism. A recent study reports that informal judgment may be particularly problematic for languages other than English, and advocates for a more rigorous peer-reivew of linguistic judgments (Linzen and Oseki 2018). With Sebastian Schuster and Philip Weiss, we have been workin on an online platform called Open Linguistics that enables linguists to record examples, collect informal judgments, and share them more easily and rigorously. Visit our website to learn more.

Teaching
- Previous Courses (more)
  - Advanced Syntactic Theory
  - Introduction to Syntactic Theory
  - Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
  - Introduction to Language Acquisition
  - Introduction to Linguistics
  - Undergraduate Research Methods
- Critical Thinking (more)
  - What is critical thinking? How can we help students improve it? What role can linguists and linguistics play? I have been collaborating with researchers and teachers in philosophy who specialize in improving critical thinking skills to address these questions. More recently, I have started a colaboration with ThinkerAnalytix an educational nonprofit, to develop critical thinking methods for science classrooms.