Like birds born to chirp, humans are born to parse, predisposed to assign linguistic structures to what they hear.  This yields a view of language variation quite different from one based on parameters defined at UG. This approach to language acquisition makes two contributions to Minimalist thinking.  First, it minimizes the pre-wired components of internal […]

O propósito desta mesa é apresentar as mais importantes vertentes dos estudos fonológicos fundadas a partir da segunda metade do século passado e que, ainda hoje, vicejam promovendo inúmeras investigações e análises teóricas. Para tanto, convidamos a Profa. Carmen Matzenauer para tratar da Fonologia Gerativa, a Profa. Luciani Tenani para expor sobre a Fonologia Prosódica […]

Paul Grice famously made a distinction between sentence meaning (the properties of a sentence assigned to it by the grammar) and speaker’s meaning (what the speaker intended to communicate by uttering a sentence).  This distinction is arguably at the core of Experimental Pragmatics, which is a discipline devoted to (a) testing pragmatic theories (and often […]

La linguistique historique  romane à l’heure actuelle se voit enrichie du matériel varié et puisé des sources multiples (bases des données, corpus, publications des textes y compris des fac-similés etc ). Ajoutons-y les resultats des recherches des disciplines confinantes (histoire, ethnologie, paléographie). C’est ce qui permet d’appliquer à la sociolinguistique diachronique  les paroles de J.-P.  […]

Linguists have always gathered data for analysis in many different ways. In current times, a major method of doing linguistics – in person work in speech communities – has been made impossible, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This has brought other methods to the fore, and with it their advantages and disadvantages. While work in […]

The concepts of “the language organ” and “the language acquisition device” advanced by Chomsky and others in the tradition of Generative Grammar are controversial in part because their neurobiological instantiation is unclear. Here I address this by reviewing recent evidence from brain imaging and lesion-symptom mapping in aphasia. I propose a model for how the […]

Nearly a century ago, following the formation of the Linguistic Society of America, Leonard Bloomfield presented a brief defense of the formation of the society and the legitimacy of “a science of language”. He construed the field of linguistics – at that time not quite so much a discipline – as belonging to the human […]

Nos Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (PALOP) circulam diversas línguas: línguas africanas (do grupo bantu, do grupo khoisan e crioulos), línguas asiáticas e línguas europeias. Das línguas europeias se destaca o português que é a língua oficial e, consequentemente do ensino. As línguas africanas são línguas maternas para a grande maioria dos alunos nos […]

This talk explores ways in which theoretical and empirical research related to word knowledge and use can inform solutions to real world problems. We will examine patterns of lexical association and retrieval, and will propose that awareness of those patterns might offer new perspectives on language acquisition, effective communication, and language attrition in conditions such […]

Apesar de sabido que “Entre as experiências mais marcantes da história do encontro entre populações indígenas e colonizadores estão a descoberta, a entrada, a aquisição e o impacto da escrita com seus inevitáveis corolários: alfabetização, letramento e escolarização” (Bruna Franchetto, 2008), pouco ainda sabemos sobre as mudanças operadas pela escrita no âmbito das sociedades indígenas […]