Early word segmentation and word learning: Prosody, phonotactics, and face masks Word segmentation is the ability to extract word-forms from continuous speech. This ability plays a crucial role in language acquisition, particularly for word learning, and has been shown to develop differently across languages. In turn, word learning is a central linguistic skill that has […]

“Speaking with names”: On the origins, aims and methods of Interactional Onomastics Elwys De Stefani (Heidelberg, Germany) Language philosophers and onomasticians of different approaches have variously emphasised the centrality of usage in ascertaining the nature and functions of proper names (see Coates 2017 for a recent discussion). Surprisingly, however, onomastic scholars have scarcely ever tried […]

Clear cases of covert A-movement are difficult to identify and seem to be exceedingly rare (Polinsky & Potsdam 2013). However, recent work in the A-bar domain has demonstrated that spell-out patterns of movement copies can be regulated by morphological well-formedness conditions (e.g. Landau 2006, Reintges 2007, Scott 2021). This talk argues that, in the right […]

Nesta mesa, propomos uma discussão sobre a produção de pesquisadores-ativistas que rompem a lógica de silenciamentos e apagamentos das vozes do Centro-Norte e, mais especificamente, das vozes indígenas.

Piagetian approaches to development highlight the role of the child as a little scientist, actively exploring her world in such a way as to optimise learning. Vygostky’s little apprentice, on the other hand, learns language in social interactions with knowledgable others. I suggest that any theory of language learning must combine these two approaches to […]

Participantes: Bruno Rochette; Julia Burghini; Fábio Fortes. Moderador: Alessandro Jocelito Beccari A mesa-redonda, na área de Historiografia Linguística, em perspectiva interdisciplinar com os Estudos Clássicos, traz um panorama dos estudos sobre a história da gramática greco-latina. Nesse aspecto, congrega três especialistas, sendo dois convidados internacionais, que investigam o tema. O objetivo é difundir e renovar […]

Construction grammarians, who propose that all of our knowledge of language can be described as stored form-function pairings, are sometimes believed to engage in little more than ‘butterfly collecting’. The perception is that they love idiosyncratic constructions so much that most of their energy goes towards finding unusual patterns and describing their unique syntactic or […]

Linguistic variation can roughly be defined as ‘different ways of saying the same thing’. This concept encompasses a very wide range of phenomena and sources of variation, including alternations and competing choices on the level of sounds, morphosyntax, lexicon and discourse, all of which can be conditioned by geographic, social, situational and individual factors. Traditionally, […]

The term ‘distributive numeral’ was introduced into formal linguistics by Gil (1982, 1995) to describe numeral noun phrases indicating that a plurality of individuals or events is distributed with respect to another plurality. On the relational approach advocated by Gill (see also Choe 1987, Zimmermann 2002 a.o.), distributivity is understood as a relation between two […]

While the world’s languages differ in many respects, they share certain commonalities: these can provide crucial insight on our shared cognition and how it impacts language structure. In this project, we explore the learnability sources and consequences of one of the most striking commonalities across languages: the way word frequencies are distributed. Across languages, words […]