General
Titel |
Video |
Videobeschreibung |
| Chomsky, Noam. The Delphic Oracle: Her Message for Today |
Talk in English by the famous Noam Chomsky about the Delphic Oracle and what her messages can mean to us today (e.g. in times of the pandemic and climate change). | |
| Croft, William. On Typology |
Typology uncovers universals of language through cross-linguistic comparison; many such universals have been found since Greenberg's word order universals. But what do typological universals have to do with analyzing a single language, such as your native language, or a language you are doing fieldwork on? After all, analyzing the syntactic structure of a single language is based on distributional analysis, the crisscrossing patterns of occurrence of words in constructions. Typology has to compare languages in other ways, through meaning and through cross-linguistically valid formal properties of syntactic structure. In this talk, I will show how the analysis of the syntax of a single language and the study of typological universals are part and parcel of the same theoretical enterprise. | |
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de Mareüil, Philippe Boula. |
Apresentamos um atlas sonoro que assume a forma de um site web, apresentando mapas interativos de países europeus, onde se pode clicar em centenas de pontos de pesquisa para ouvir trechos de fala e ler uma transcrição do que é dito em dialetos ou línguas regionais. Gravamos a fábula de Esopo “O vento norte/sul e o sol” (usado há um século pela Associação Internacional de Fonética para ilustrar muitas línguas do mundo) em mais de 700 pontos de pesquisa na França, na Itália, na Bélgica, na Suíça, na Península Ibérica, na Alemanha, etc. O site, acessível em https://atlas.limsi.fr , teve algum sucesso nos círculos de ensino, na imprensa escrita/audiovisual e nas mídias sociais, com mais de 700.000 visitas. Essa ferramenta é bem adequada para ilustrar e comparar particularmente as línguas neo-latinas, dentro de abordagens dialectométricos. |
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| Fedorenko, Evelina. The Language System In The Human Mind And Brain |
Talk in English by Evelina Fedorenko dealing with how the language system works in the human mind and brain. | |
| Goldberg, Adele. Good Enough Language Production: Children are Both More Conservative and More Ready Generalizers for The Same Reason |
There is a lot of evidence that children are “conservative” in that they do not generalize the language they hear to the same extent as adults. And yet there’s also work that reports that children generalize (“regularize”) even more than adults. This presentation will address this apparent paradox and argue that both effects stem from the same process: failure to access the best (combination of) constructions and instead producing a “good-enough” option. The challenge children face stems from their need to gain fluency with a rich network of constructions that are conditioned by a wide array of conceptual, contextual, and social factors. | |
| Hellwig, Birgit. Language Documentation, Acquisition and Socialization: Widening the Evidential Base |
It is estimated that acquisition data is available for only around 1-2% of the world’s 7.000+ languages. We continue to know very little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages. There is an urgent need to address this bias and to build our theories of language development on a more representative sample of the world’s languages. This talk explores the possibilities of extending the language documentation approach to include the documentation of child language and child-directed language. | |
| McElvenny, James. Typology and the History of Linguistics |
Typological questions have played an important role in language scholarship since at least the beginning of disciplinary linguistics in the early 19th century. The first use of the term "typology" in a specifically linguistic sense, however, would seem to have come at the end of that century, in a posthumous 1894 paper by the German linguist and sinologist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Gabelentz' paper represents a pivotal – and yet somewhat underappreciated – moment in the history of linguistics, which links traditional concerns of 19th-century language classification with innovative, hyper-modern proposals that seem to anticipate key features of later efforts in language typology from the early 20th century up to the present day. In this talk, I will examine Gabelentz' proposals in historical context and see what lessons this history might offer to us as practising linguists today. | |
| McWhorter, John H. What Adults do to Language and How They Create New Ones |
Since the Neolithic Revolution 10,000 years ago, certain languages have come to be learned more by adults than children. This kind of acquisition significantly decreases grammatical complexity, and the result is languages much less grammatically complex than most others. This means that the natural state of language is of the grammatical complexity of Slavic languages or many Native American ones, while languages like English and Indonesian are a relatively new type. Then, under other circumstances, adult acquisition simplifies a language to the extent of pidginization, after which this pidgin is transformed into a new language called a creole. | |
| Newmeyer, Frederick. Can One Language Be ‘More Complex’ Than Another? | It has long been an article of faith among linguists (though not among the general public) that all languages are equally complex. Three beliefs have led to this conclusion. First, the idea that languages might differ in complexity seems to go against enlightened humanistic thought: Asserting that one language is ‘simple’ and another ‘complex’ seems to open the door to the disturbing idea that some human societies are ‘more advanced’ or ‘more primitive’ than others. Second, there is at least some evidence that simplicity in one part of a language is balanced out by complexity in another part, leaving overall complexity the same from language to language. And third, one can interpret the theory of Universal Grammar as requiring that all languages be equal in complexity. I argue in this talk that none of the three arguments, when examined carefully, holds water. | |
| Preminger, Omer. The Building-Blocks of Language |
As Wilhelm von Humboldt observed long ago, human language is characterized by its ability to make "infinite use of finite means." But what are these finite means, exactly? In this talk, I will review existing work by various linguists, as well as observations of my own, that point to a different answer. First, there is no workable definition of 'word' except phonologically and (in some languages) orthographically. Second, the fundamental building blocks of syntax turn out to be fully abstract, aligning with neither morphological exponents nor listed units of meaning. This has consequences for the practice of linguistic theory itself, but also for the evolution of the human capacity for language. The results discussed here demonstrate that there is a second discontinuity to account for: the fundamental building blocks of human language are themselves qualitatively different from anything that exists, or could have existed, outside of human language. |
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| Preston, Dennis R. The Perception of Language Varieties: What’s Been Going On? |
Putting aside seminal work on the perception of language variety from The Netherlands and Japan, some of the earliest studies of folk perception were carried out on Brazilian Portuguese by researchers from Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in the country. The approach and methodologies used then have changed considerably in subsequent work, and I want to provide an update of the principal advances. The initial question of “where do nonlinguists perceive speech boundaries to exist” has been expanded to include considerations of the linguistic and nonlinguistic foundations of those perceptions, giving rise to increasingly sophisticated experimental work and modes of representation and interpretation. |
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| Wedel, Andy. The Role of Communication Efficiency In Shaping Language |
Over the last century, we've gained a great deal of evidence that language structures evolve in ways that optimize communication efficiency. In the lexicon for example, Zipf (1939) famously showed that words which are more predictable tend to be shorter, and vice versa. This relationship reduces overall speaker effort while preserving communication accuracy. In the first part of this talk, I will review some of the most interesting recent findings that illustrate the apparent influence of communication efficiency on lexicons and grammars. |