Linguists are often talking about evolution these days, but language structures are rarely explained by evolutionary adaptation. But in this talk, I claim that a wide range of structures (e.g. phoneme inventories, case-marking patterns, word order patterns, causative constructions, subordinate-clause constructions) can be explained as adapted to their “environments”, i.e. the needs of language users. […]

Esta mesa, coorganizada por ABRALIN y SAEL, se propone mostrar cómo la investigación experimental aporta evidencia sustancial para comprender los procesos y las representaciones que subyacen a los distintos dominios y habilidades lingüísticos así como la actividad cerebral que los sustenta. En su presentación, Adolfo García aborda la organización neural del procesamiento semántico y propone […]

In this talk, I will do two things. First, I will discuss the space that rhetorical relations occupy in language, and the issue of consensus on a common taxonomy of relations. Second, I will review the issue of signals for coherence relations and describe our corpus annotation of a broad set of signals. First, in […]

Language development requires, to begin with, that the infant gain the ability to understand and produce identifiable word forms. This talk will focus on the first two years of life, with particular emphasis on the role of vocal practice, not only in production but also in word-recognition and segmentation: Self-action has been found to be […]

Lexical semantics has changed considerably in the past three decades, not least because of the emergence of Cognitive Semantics. To put those changes in the right perspective, this talk will describe the main stages in the development of word meaning research in modern linguistics: from historical semantics in the 19th century, over structuralist semantics in […]

O objetivo desta mesa-redonda é explorar o potencial da interação humano-máquina para aprimorar tarefas de tradução e de produção textual multilíngue, com o objetivo de abordar, entre outras perguntas, as seguintes: Como o ser humano pode desenvolver a inteligência da máquina com vistas a prover serviços linguísticos que atendam às necessidades dos usuários-alvo? Que percursos […]

A Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (GDF; em inglês FDG – Hengeveld & Mackenzie, Functional Discourse Grammar, OUP 2008) surgiu nos primeiros anos deste século como teoria sucessora da Gramática Funcional de Simon Dik. Trata-se de uma abordagem estrutural-funcional: encara os Atos Discursivos como instrumentos de uma estratégia comunicativa e descreve as propriedades dos Enunciados como resultado dessa […]

Akabea belongs to the Great Andamanese family, one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands. All that remains today of this family is a handful of “rememberers” of so-called Present-Day Great Andamanese, based on the language furthest removed from Akabea. None of the traditional languages was the subject of professional linguistic documentation […]