About

Gennaro Chierchia is the Haas Foundations Professor of Linguistics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His intellectual work centers on studying how meaning takes shape in human language. A central theme in his research is the idea that a natural logic, a way of drawing inferences, spontaneously develops and attaches to the syntactic structures generated by our capacity for recursive computation. This natural logic endows human language with a unique communicative and referential power not found in other species. Chierchia's research explores specific topics such as properties and predication, including control, raising, and de se attributions; noun phrase structure, distinguishing between quantified and bare nominals as well as mass and count nouns; anaphora and presuppositions; implicatures; and polarity phenomena. He is also interested in investigating these linguistic phenomena through experimental methods. Chierchia has been recognized as a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019 and has published extensively with prestigious presses including Oxford University Press, CSLI, MIT Press, Il Mulino, University of Chicago Press, and Kluwer/Reidel.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Archaeology
• Programming language
• Mathematics
• Physics
• History

Selected publications

• Entailment and implicature in the language of thought

  2025-04-21

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Human language processing involves constant computation of entailments and implicatures, yetthe extent to which these inferences depend on linguistic communication remains unclear. Thisstudy investigates whether logical structures akin to those in natural language can be derived frompurely visual input. Specifically, we examine the polarity sensitivity of scalar inferences (SIs) innon-linguistic contexts. Prior research has established that SIs are preferentially computed inUpward Entailing (UE) rather than Downward Entailing (DE) environments, and we extend thosestudies by examining whether this pattern extends to visual conceptualization. We conducted threeexperiments using an oddball paradigm with minimal instructions to our participants, where theywitenessed animated ball collisions. Across studies, participants consistently detected thesechanges to the quantified structure of events (changes from some to all) more readily in UE thanin DE conditions, mirroring SI patterns observed in language. These findings suggest that theconceptualization of visual scenes parallels linguistic representations, implying that entailmentrelations are not exclusive to communication but emerge naturally from cognitive structures. Ourresults support grammaticalized theories of implicatures, challenging traditional Gricean viewsthat implicatures stem solely from communicative intent. This work contributes to ongoing debateson the relationship between language and thought, demonstrating that logical inferences can ariseindependently of linguistic input.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Movement and crossover in three languages

  Natural Language & Linguistic Theory · 2025-02-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Kinds, properties and atelicity

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2024-01-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Since at least Vendler 1967, one of the most widely discussed data points, often viewed as the ultimate test for (a)telicity, is the behavior of durative modifiers with respect to different VP types as in John killed mosquitos/*a mosquito for an hour. In the present paper, I explore a new blend of the two most widespread approaches to this issue, namely (i) the view of durative modifiers as universal quantifiers (e.g., Dowty 1979, a.o.) and (ii) their view as aspect sensitive measure adverbials (e.g., Krifka 1998, a.o.). The blend explored here is based on an economy constraint specific to the scope of adverbial quantification (‘do not weaken’ cf. Bassa Vanrell 2017) combined with the identification of the special role that kinds and properties may play as direct bearers of thematic relations in an event-based semantics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Four types of quantifiers at the interface between syntax and logic

  2024-06-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Without quantifiers and quantification the capacity to draw inferences is extremely impoverished. The typology of quantifiers across the languages of the world bears a clear resemblance relation to generalized quantifiers in logic, but it is significantly richer and more varied. In this paper I show how the main quantificational devices that Universal Grammar affords us fall into four natural classes: (i) Determiner quantifiers (e.g., every, many, some,…) (ii) Adverbial quantifiers (e.g., always, usually, frequently, …) (iii) Alternative-oriented quantifiers (e.g., only, even, also,…) and (iv) Polarity-sensitive quantifiers (e.g., any). Of these four classes, Determiner quantifiers are the ones that one finds in standard logical theories; they are, however, NOT universally attested across languages, while the other three classes seem to be. This articulated typology raises a number of key questions pertaining to the relation between language and cognition: How do these types of quantifiers come about? What is special about them? Why do languages insist in resorting to these quantifier types so pervasively?

  PublisherDOI

• Identifying (In)Definiteness in Vietnamese Noun Phrase

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2022-08-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper aims to settle the issue of whether những, các, một are articles in Vietnamese as argued by Nguyen T. C. (1975), Nguyen H. T. (2004), a.o. First, we adopt Dayal (in prep.)’s cross-linguistic questionnaire of (in)definiteness since this questionnaire offers us a set of useful tests to diagnose definiteness and indefiniteness from a crosslinguistic perspective. Second, we broaden up the empirical landscape by contrasting the interpretation of nominal constructions which have the so-called overt (in)definite markers (các-CLF-N, những-CLF-N, and một CLF N) with that of nominal constructions without them (including bare N and CLF-N, numeral(>1)-CLF-N), in order to see if the (in)definiteness effect truly comes from the presence or absence of these three markers, or from something else. We then conclude that (i) những and các are plural markers, (ii) only một seems to be a likely candidate for an indefinite article, and (iii) bare nouns and numerals are not genuine indefinites: the former denotes kinds, while the latter can be interpreted as definite, which sets Vietnamese apart cross-linguistically.

  Publisher

• ‘People are fed up; don’t mess with them.’ Non-quantificational Arguments and Polarity Reversals

  Journal of Semantics · 2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  Abstract The first sentence in the title means roughly: All the people around are tired. The second means: Do not mess with any of them. Even though the second sentence looks just like a negative counterpart of the first, it doesn’t have the expected compositional meaning: it doesn’t mean “do not mess with all the people”. This phenomenon is extremely general. It takes place with Bare Plurals, as in the title. It figures prominently in the behavior of Plural Definites (I spoke to the students in trouble ≅ ∀/I didn’t speak to the students in trouble ≅ ¬∃). It also takes place with Donkey pronouns (Every farmer who had a donkey sold it ≅ ∀/No man who had a donkey sold it ≅ ¬∃). These switches of quantificational force under polarity reversals call to mind Free Choice phenomena. In particular, a determiner like any is interpreted as a narrow scope existential in a sentence like I didn’t talk to any student in trouble ≅ ¬ ∃; however, in positive environments, the existential meaning of any emerges as strengthened to universal I spoke to any student in trouble ≅ ∀. It is tempting to conjecture that the source of this uniform behavior is a uniform mechanism. While these constructions (Free Choice any, Bare Plurals, Plural Definites, and Donkey pronouns) have been studied extensively, and insightful approaches to Plural Definites in terms of Free Choice mechanisms have also been proposed (Bar Lev 2018, 2021), a unitary analysis has not been attempted to the best of my knowledge. In spite of the many challenges that a unified analysis faces, it is worth a try, for, if successful, it would considerably push forward our understanding of a wide range of very diverse constructions.

  PublisherDOI

• Mass vs. Count: Where Do We Stand? Outline of a Theory of Semantic Variation

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  I will illustrate and discuss the extent to which grammars may vary vis-à-vis the mass/count distinction with three main phenomena and use this as a springboard for outlining a theory of semantic variation, with a universal logical basis. The first form of variation concerns the most widespread empirical test associated with the mass/count distinction, namely how noun phrases (NPs) combine with numerals. The second is that of the so called 'fake' mass nouns (like furniture). The third concerns alternations between mass vs. count interpretations of nouns like beer or chicken.

  PublisherDOI

• Contemporary Issues in Natural Language Semantics: an interview with Gennaro Chierchia

  Figshare · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Chierchia discusses his views on the frontiers of contemporary semantics: multidimensionality of meaning, alternative semantics, ‘mid level’ generalizations, the natural logicality of natural languages, the role of reference, and the place of new methodologies, i.e. lab-experiments.

  PublisherDOI

• Contemporary Issues in Natural Language Semantics: an interview with Gennaro Chierchia

  DELTA Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Linguistics

  ABSTRACT Chierchia discusses his views on the frontiers of contemporary semantics: multidimensionality of meaning, alternative semantics, ‘mid level’ generalizations, the natural logicality of natural languages, the role of reference, and the place of new methodologies, i.e. lab-experiments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On Plural and Mass Nominals and the Structure of the World

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2020-08-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Maria Teresa Guasti

  University of Milano-Bicocca

  9 shared

• Einat Shetreet

  Tel Aviv University

  8 shared

• Claudio Luzzatti

  University of Milano-Bicocca

  8 shared

• Davide Crepaldi

  7 shared

• Lisa S. Arduino

  7 shared

• Graziella Ghirardi

  7 shared

• Andrea Gualmini

  Utrecht University

  6 shared

• Luisa Meroni

  Utrecht University

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2001

• B.A., Philosophy

  University of California, Berkeley

  1996