Isaac Gould
Ewha Womans University · Arts and Humanities
About the Lab
Professor Isaac Gould's research lab focuses on the intersection of virology, immunology, and linguistic cognition. The lab investigates the role of herpes simplex virus (HSV) antibodies in cervical dysplasia and cancer progression, exploring serological markers and cellular immune responses in women with cervical lesions. Concurrently, the lab examines syntactic acquisition in children, particularly how ambiguous linguistic evidence shapes the learning of syntactic parameters across languages such as Swiss German, Korean, and English. The lab also conducts typological studies on causative morphology, as seen in Polynesian languages like Niuean, analyzing the functional and structural properties of causative prefixes such as 'faka-'.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
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Selected Papers
15Sprecher-Goldberger, S. (Inst. Pasteur du Brabant, 28 rue du Remorqueur, 1040 Bruxelles, Belgium), L. Thiry, I. Gould, Y. Fassin and C. Gompel. Increasing antibody titers to herpes simplex virus type 2 during follow-up of women with cervical dysplasia. Amer J Epidemiol 97: 103–110, 1973.—Specific neutralizing antibodies to herpes simplex virus type 2 were titrated in 24 women with cervical dysplasia and in 29 women with inflammatory atypia in cervical smears. The antibody titers were determined
<p class="p1">We offer a new, unified approach to the derivation and interpretation of head-external, head-internal, and heretofore understudied doubly-headed relative clauses in Japanese. Our proposal is motivated by new data on the interpretation of these different forms of relative clauses with quantificational heads, in different contexts. Head-internal and doubly-headed relative clauses are interpreted as definite descriptions with their quantificational head interpreted in their surface, r
Thiry, L. (Institut Pasteur du Brabant, Brussels, 1040 Belgium), S. Sprecher- Goldberger. Y. Fassin, I. Gould, C. Gompel, J. Pestiau and F. De Halleux. Variations of cytotoxic antibodies to cells with herpes simplex virus antigens in women with progressing or regressing cancerous lesions of the cervix. Am J Epidemiol 100:261–261, 1974.—Antibodies to herpes simplex virus antigens were followed for a period of 3 to 30 months in 126 women attending a center for detection of cancer. Neutralizing ant
Non-immunoglobulin G-neutralizing antibodies to herpes simplex virus (HSV) type 2 were assayed in sera adsorbed with Staphylococcus aureus Cowan I. They were present in 8% of women with normal cervical smear and in 20, 41, and 74% of women with atypia, dysplasia, and cervical carcinoma, respectively. Lymphocytes of the patients were tested for in vitro transformation by killed HSV type 1 and HSV type 2 (HSV-2), as well as by mitomycin C-treated hamster cells transformed by HSV or other viruses o
This book investigates the role that ambiguous evidence can play in the acquisition of syntax. To illustrate this, the book introduces a probabilistic learning model for syntactic parameters that learns a grammar of best fit to the learner’s evidence. The model is then applied to a range of cross-linguistic case studies – in Swiss German, Korean, and English – involving child errors, grammatical variability, and implicit negative evidence. Building on earlier work on language modeling, this book
This paper examines the causative prefix faka - in Niuean, a Polynesian language. Faka - can attach to a noun, adjective or verb, to create a verb or adverb. Usually a verb formed with faka - is causative, though faka - can instead denote intention or distance, and it appears to provide a reflexive sense in many cases. Faka - can attach to transitive stems and when it does, either the internal argument of the stem verb is unexpressed or it is expressed as an instrumental applicative, and the ste
Japanese has both head-external and head-internal relative clauses (HERC &amp; HIRC). Example (1a) shows a standard HERC. In contrast, the HIRC in (1b) has the form of an independent sentence, the bold-faced head occurring inside the relative, and it is followed by the complementizer-no and a
Nissenbaum (2000) and Heck and Himmelreich (2017) (henceforth HH) are two prominent works that are noteworthy for focusing on the interaction of multiple movement dependencies (MMDs) and parasitic gaps (PGs). However, these two works consider disjoint and contrasting types of data paradigms. In this squib, I take both types of paradigms into consideration. In doing so, there are three inter-related questions that arise for our understanding of PGs (and in particular for PGs that involve certain
Abstract This paper discusses how German parasitic gap data from various earlier publications illustrate two patterns of systematic grammatical variation in the language, which have not been previously identified as such in the literature. I show how Heck and Himmelreich’s (Heck, Fabian & Anke Himmelreich. 2017. Opaque intervention. Linguistic Inquiry 48. 47–97) analysis for one pattern, although not able to currently capture both patterns, can be extended by allowing for variation in the po
This paper addresses the puzzle of choosing among competing syntactic theories, which are contrasting theories that can nevertheless all properly account for the utterances of some language. To do so, I develop an evaluation metric that is based on language learnability and acquisition. In particular, such an acquisition-based metric considers speed of acquiring a target grammar, as well as relative accuracy of acquisition. In applying such a metric, I propose using the kinds of novel data that
This chapter compares two contrasting approaches to accounting for the verb placement errors in child Swiss German that are described in Schönenberger (2001). The first is a learning model that captures the errors because it both learns from ambiguous input and has a rich hypothesis space of interacting parameters (Gould 2017). The second captures the errors instead by means of a cognitive bias early in development, namely a heuristic for Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) (cf. Futrell et al.
Research Areas
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