Assistant Professor,
Linguistics and Cognitive Science,
University of California, Davis
Function Words
They are the billionaire class of words! A small but extremely influential group 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, quantification, certainty, time, etc. 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.
- Selected Publications
- ● Liu, Z., & Jasbi, M. (2025). The development of English negative constructions and communicative functions. Language Learning and Development, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2025.2468335
- ● Portelance, E. and Jasbi, M. (2024), The Roles of Neural Networks in Language Acquisition. Language and Linguistics Compass, 18: e70001. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.70001
- ● Jasbi, M., Bermudez, N., & Davidson, K. (2023). Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction. In T. Knowlton, F. Schwarz, & A. Papafragou (Eds.), Proceedings of Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM 2). Vol. 2. (pp. 129-141). https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.2.5382
- ● Jasbi, M., Jaggi, A., Clark, E. V., & Frank, M. C. (2022). Context-Dependent Learning of Linguistic Disjunction. Journal of Child Language, 51(1), 1–36. doi:10.1017/S0305000922000502
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