IUSS Linguistics Seminars
"Gaps, rational learning, and a knowledge norm on forms"
Day, July 6, 2026, 11:00 am – 13:00 am CEST
Roni Katzir, Tel Aviv University
Introduced by:
Andrea Moro & Matteo Greco (IUSS Pavia)
Roni Katzir is a full professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Computational Linguistics Lab and co-leads the Reintegrating Linguistics project. He holds a BSc in mathematics from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in linguistics from MIT, and has held visiting positions at Cornell University and MIT. His research sits at the intersection of formal linguistics, cognitive science, and computation, focusing on language acquisition, the role of simplicity in learning, and how meaning is shaped by unexpressed alternatives. More recently, he has turned his attention to large language models and their relation to human linguistic cognition. His work has appeared in leading linguistics journals and has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
In this talk, he will look at how arbitrary paradigm gaps (*forgoed/*forwent) can seem surprising in light of common assumptions about morphology and learning. Perhaps understandably, morphologists have troubled themselves with such cases and offered different ways in which they can be accommodated within the morphological component of the grammar, often by making major departures from common assumptions about morphology and about rational inference. I will suggest that these worries and the proposed remedies are premature. The worries arise from the unmotivated assumption that all gaps are necessarily derived within individual grammars. Once this assumption is abandoned, the observed properties of gaps become much less puzzling. The only new assumption that is needed is that speakers only use forms that they know (and not just believe) to be correct.