Masoud Jasbi

Assistant Professor,
Department of Linguistics,
UC Davis

Function Words

They are the billionaire class in language. A small group of extremely influential words like "the", "a", "and", "or","of", "to", and "not" that make up most of our speech, while the majority of words rarely get a chance to show up. Why are function words so powerful?

Abstract Combinatorial Meaning

Function words encode abstract logical and combinatorial concepts such as negation, disjunction, time, and spatial relations. They are like the nuts and bolts that hold sentences together and make 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 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 in computational linguistics and machine learning.

Research
- Developmental Semantics/Pragmatics: How do abstract functional meanings emerge and develop in the child's mind?
  - The Development of Logical Meaning: What is the role of language in the emergence and deveopment of logical concepts?
  - The Development of Presuppositional Meaning: How do children learn what is presupposed in conversation?
    - Jasbi (2016). The Acquisition of Projective Content: Children's comprehension of the English presupposition trigger "too"
- Persian Semantics/Pragmatics: How much do languages vary in the ways they encode functional meaning?
  - Jasbi (to appear): The suffix that makes Farsi nouns unique
  - Jasbi (to appear): The meaning of the Farsi object marker "ra"
  - Jasbi (2016): Three Types of Indefinites in Persian
- 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)
  - Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics (undergrad)
  - Introduction to Language Acquisition (undergrad + grad)
  - Introduction to Linguistics (undergrad)
  - 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.
- Diversity
  - The US Travel Ban on citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela has significantly affected students who want to study in social and cognitive sciences in the US. They cannot travel to the US for interviews and open houses, and many brilliant students do not even have the ability to pay for application fees. There is also little guidance on how they should approach the application process. With the help of several colleagues, we have established a platform to help students from these countries in their applications to graduate schools in the US, both professionally and financially. Please visit www.travelbanstudents.net for more information.