Fabio Del Prete
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fabio-del-prete
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0000-0002-6174-8536
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168001055
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296460663
- ISNI : 0000000401600948
- ResearcherID : AAK-5307-2021
Présentation
I am a CNRS researcher in linguistics and a member of the Cognition, Languages, Language, and Ergonomics Laboratory (CLLE) in Toulouse. I earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2006 from the University of Milan, with a dissertation on the semantics of the Italian temporal connectives prima (‘before’) and dopo (‘after’). I have also completed training and research stays at Stanford University and at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. My specialization in philosophy is the analytic philosophy of language, a formal approach that uses logical analysis to study language, with the aim to shed light on the semantic content of utterances, their functions in communication and their pragmatic implications, as well as how the content of an utterance may depend on the context in which it is made and how its truth value may depend on the context in which it is evaluated. My training also covers temporal logic and modal logic, theories that focus on formalizing reasoning based on the concepts of past, present, and future, and what is possible and what is necessary. I have been working for over two decades on the semantic and pragmatic analysis of natural language, with research on Italian, Sicilian, Portuguese, French, and English. My research topics include tense, aspect, and modality. Some of my work addresses issues of grammaticalization and semantic change—that is, how certain expressions that originally had concrete lexical content come to acquire a more abstract, grammatical meaning. Situated at the intersection of linguistics, philosophy, and logic, my research has developed around several key areas: (a) Temporal connectives and discourse connectives: the temporal order of events based on relations of anteriority and succession, and the transition from this order to the notions of (un)persistence of a proposition’s truth in discourse.
(b) The temporal localization of events, the representation of their internal structure, and the interaction between the temporal and modal dimensions.
(c) Temporality and gradability, scalar structure.
(d) The representation of personal pronouns as variables, the role of context in determining the value of free pronouns, the modal structure of assignment functions and the mechanisms of pronoun binding and quantification.
(e) Complex verbal predicates and descriptions of complex events; the semantics of complex predicates constructed with aspectual verbs and verbs of motion.
(f) The history and origins of the concept of conversational implicature.
(g) The comparison between the behavior of human speakers and that of artificial intelligence systems. My works in the areas above reflect interdisciplinary interests: (tr1) The categories of time and modality serve as bridging concepts that have facilitated the exchange of ideas between the formal study of linguistic structures, the philosophical analysis of notions such as succession and simultaneity, past, present, and future, and possibility and necessity, and the logical modeling of reasoning based on these notions.
(tr2) The category of quantification involves grammar (what is the status of quantificational expressions vis-à-vis the referential expressions), philosophy (what is the logical form of propositions containing quantifiers), and logic (how to model quantification in natural languages in a way that correctly represents the inferential relations between quantified sentences in those languages).
(tr3) The category of indexicality, which manifests itself in the dependence of the interpretation of linguistic structures on the context of utterance, requires that we take into account both the formal features of language and the speakers’ situation in the world, with all the complexity that this latter aspect entails.
(tr4) The phenomenon of implicatures has a long history, spanning the study of the rhetorical and non-truth-conditional functions of language, philosophers’ analytical distinctions between different levels of meaning (including the key distinction between conventional or literal meaning and non-literal or figurative meaning), and logicians’ attempts to model the inferential relationships characteristic of implicatures in relation to deductive logical relationships.
(tr5) Comparing humans and AI is a more recent aspect of my work; the goal is not only to evaluate the performance of AI systems, but also to test their cognitive plausibility: to what extent do these systems process language in a manner comparable to that of humans? This type of question builds on my earlier work in semantics and pragmatics, where I have relied on speakers’ intuitions or corpus data to test hypotheses about the construction of meaning.
Domaines de recherche
Compétences
Publications
Publications
Acting without acting: Sicilian "Mòviti fermo!" `Move still!' between human judgment and language modelsPhronesis III: Language Rhetoric and Persuasion in Humans and Machines, The University of Chicago; Institut Jean Nicod, Feb 2026, Paris, France |
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Mòviti fermo": non un’inversione, ma una deviazioneCongresso internazionale di linguistica e di filologia romanza (CILFR), Société de Linguistique Romane, Jun 2025, Lecce (ITALY), Italy |
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Age of acquisition and clausal order effects in temporal constructions: a cross-linguistic study in French Sign Language (LSF) and Italian Sign Language (LIS)FEAST 6 (Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory), University of Michigan, Aug 2024, Ann Arbor (MI), United States. pp.74 - 85., ⟨10.31009/FEAST.i6.07⟩ |
Future tense and modal forcingCHRONOS 15: 15th International Conference on Actionality, Tense, Aspect, Modality/Evidentiality, CLLE; IRIT; CNRS; Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, May 2024, Toulouse, France |
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Apprehension in Romance: Bouletic and Epistemic Modality in Portuguese and Italian53rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 53), INALCO; Université Paris Cité; Université Sorbonne Nouvelle; Université Paris Saclay, Jun 2023, Paris, France |
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Partiality, situations and branching timeWorkshop Correlating possibilities (satellite workshop of OASIS 2), Oct 2019, Nantes, France |
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Motion verb constructions and parameters of grammaticalizationPseudo Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions 2, Mar 2019, Venice, Italy |
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Future and indeterminatenessIndeterminatezza e relativismo, Oct 2017, Venice, Italy |
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Now there will be trouble. Two puzzles of tense-modal forcing4th Annual IAPT Conference, International Association for the Philosophy of Time, Jun 2017, Gargnano del Garda, Italy |
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Gender in conditionalsGender in conditionals, Nov 2017, Sheffield, United Kingdom |
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Open future and modal interpretation of future tensed sentencesOpen Future Workshop, Centre for Philosophy of Time, May 2017, Milan, Italy |
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Modality, presupposition and discourse.45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), May 2015, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. ⟨10.1075/rllt.12.01ama⟩ |
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No longer true (ECAP)ECAP 8 : 8th European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, European Society for Analytic Philosophy, Aug 2014, Bucharest, Romania |
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The Puzzle of quasi prima 'almost before' and quasi dopo 'almost afterSemantics and Linguistic Theory 19, Apr 2009, Columbus, United States. pp.19-36 |
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Non-monotonic futuresPALMYR IX: Logic and the Use of Language, ILLC, Amsterdam; Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, Jun 2010, Amsterdam, Netherlands |
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Relativizing truth of future-tensed sentencesSecond Paris-Barcelona Picasso workshop : New perspectives on Relativism and Context-Dependency., Oct 2009, Paris, France |
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Difference and incrementality: a study of the polysemy of "altro" ('other') in Italian49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Jun 2023, Pittsburgh, PA, United States. |
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Iconicity and age of exposure effects in LSF temporal constructionsICSLA4 : International Conference on Sign Language Acquisition 2022, Jun 2022, on-line conference, United States |
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Universal and Existential Readings of Donkey-Sentences and the Role of a Structural Form of Domain Restriction in the Explanation of Some Distributional AnomaliesP.J.E. Dekker; R.A.M. van Rooij. Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, 2003, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Amsterdam: ILLC, 2003, Proceedings of the Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloquium |
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On a Unified Semantic Treatment of Donkey Sentences in a Dynamic FrameworkBalder ten Cate. ESSLLI 2003 Student Session, 2003, Wien, Austria. University of Vienna, 2003, Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2003 Student Session |
GenericityAlda Mari, Claire Beyssade, Fabio Del Prete. Oxford University Press, pp.464, 2013, Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, David Adger, Hagit Borer, 978-0-19-969180-7. ⟨10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691807.001.0001⟩ |
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One meaning and the other: a corpus-based study of the polysemy of "altro" ('other') in ItalianPatricia Amaral. ‘Other’: Ambiguity, constraints, and change, Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 45, Brill, pp.295 - 333, 2025, 978-90-04-74419-6. ⟨10.1163/9789004744196⟩ |
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Imperfect in Italian irrealis conditionalsGhanshyam Sharma; Michela Ippolito. Tense and aspect in Counterfactuals, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, In press, Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM], 978-3-11-133538-4 |
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Sur le chemin de la pensée GricéenneClaire Beyssade. Les implicatures : au delà du sens littéral, Les concepts fondateurs de la philosophie du langage (8), ISTE Group, pp.11-42, 2020, Sciences cognitives, 9781784057107 |
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Now there will be troublePatrick Blackburn, Per Hasle and Peter Øhrstrøm. Logic and Philosophy of Time: Further Themes from Prior, Vol. 2, Aalborg Universitetsforlag, pp.127-143, 2019, Logic and Philosophy of Time: Further Themes from Prior, Vol. 2, 978-87-7210-265-8 |
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The morphosyntax-semantics interface and the Sicilian Doubly Inflected Construction *Italian Dialectology at the Interfaces, Italian Dialectology at the Interfaces, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp.131-154, 2019, Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 9789027201768 |
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On Truth Persistence. A comparison between European Portuguese and Italian in relation to sempre.M.-H. Côté, É. Mathieu, S. Poplack. Variation within and across Romance Languages. Selected papers from the 41st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, 9789027248527. ⟨10.1075/cilt.333.11ama⟩ |
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The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences: A novel argument for the modality of will?Philippe De Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine, and Saghie Sharifzadeh. Future Times, Future Tenses, Oxford University Press, 2014, Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought, 9780199679157. ⟨10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199679157.003.0003⟩ |
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IntroductionGenericity, Oxford University Press, 2012, Genericity, 9780199691807 |
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IntroductionAlda Mari, Claire Beyssade, Fabio Del Prete. Genericity, Oxford University Press, pp.1-92, 2012, Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 978-0-19-969180-7. ⟨10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691807.003.0001⟩ |
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Imperfectivity and Habituality in ItalianAlda Mari, Claire Beyssade, Fabio Del Prete. Genericity, Oxford University Press, pp.222-249, 2012, 978-0-19-969181-4. ⟨10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691807.003.0008⟩ |
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Monsters begat by quantifiers?2014 |
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No longer true2014 |
Now', forcing and causalityCOCOA seminar. 2023 |
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Polysémie de l'italien "altro" ('autre') entre alternativité et incrémentalitéUniversité de Toulouse Jean Jaurès. 2022 |
Une analyse formelle et un test expérimental du principe "Devoir implique Pouvoir[Rapport de recherche] Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès. 2021 |
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Relazione su "Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic" (Lewis 1968)Università degli Studi di Milano. 2003 |
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Sémantique et pragmatique formelles du Temps, de l'Aspect et de la ModalitéLinguistique. Université de Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, 2022 |
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Complex event predicationsDoctoral. Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelone), Spain. 2024 |