Laboratory studies with infants and adults have shown the impressive ability humans have to extract statistical patterns from artificial languages. However artificial languages cannot fully account for the complexity and noise of natural languages, and laboratory settings do not resemble natural learning environments. In our work, instead of providing an artificial language learning environment, we […]
What do scholars of language and culture mean when we say “awareness”? In this talk, I review different approaches to awareness from the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. There is now widespread agreement that social information is embedded in grammar, and that our understanding of links between language and social categories can dictate the […]
A atividade consiste em conferência no campo da Historiografia da Linguística, na área de pesquisa sobre a Gramaticografia, ou a História da Gramática no Brasil. Serão debatidas questões de análise, como teoria e método, no trato com as gramáticas brasileiras, analisadas no contexto historiográfico.
In some languages numeral classifiers classify nouns, but the phenomenon of verb classifiers has been largely restricted to “exotic” languages of Australia and Asia. I present a detailed typological analysis showing that verb classifiers are prevalent also in Russian and indeed the entire family of Slavic languages. The grammatical function of numeral classifiers is to […]
Contemporary accounts of language emphasize predictive processing as a major contributor to processing load during interpretation (Altmann & Kamide, 1999, etc.). Accounts differ with regards to the mechanisms that support prediction during language processing (Pickering & Gambi, 2018). Bayesian/Information-theoretic accounts view prediction as resulting from automatic spreading activation in lexical representations based on prior established […]
With the participation of Eulàlia Bonet, Hagit Borer and David Embick, the panel discussion Grammar Architecture: morphology and the relevant interfaces, promoted by the Abralin Morphology Commission, focuses on word formation and its interaction to phonology and syntax. Eulàlia Bonet reviews and illustrates three cases in which a given phonological configuration has an impact on […]
Human linguistic expressions have meanings of a special kind. Proposals about what these meanings are must be defended in combination with claims about basic phenomena and explanatory goals in linguistics, as Chomsky has long stressed. I think that meanings are biologically instantiated instructions for how to build concepts of a special kind, and that these […]
O estudo dos textos gramaticais brasileiros publicados ao longo do século XX revela significativa distinção teorética quanto ao conceito de gramática. Tal conceito esteia-se predominantemente num aparato metodológico que leva em conta o caráter teleológico do texto gramatical, de tal sorte que gramáticas escritas para o ensino fundamental e médio costumam criar uma identidade da […]