讲座一
Speaker: Brian MacWhinney
Title: The emergence of grammar from perspective
Time: 21:00 – 22:30, Wed, 11 Aug 2021
(Beijing, Hong Kong time)
Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638
https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638
About the speaker
Brian MacWhinney is Teresa Heinz Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics in 1974 from the University of California at Berkeley. With Elizabeth Bates, he developed a model of first and second language processing and acquisition based on competition between item-based patterns. In 1984, he and Catherine Snow co-founded the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) Project for the computational study of child language transcript data. This system has extended to 13 additional research areas such as aphasiology, second language learning, TBI, Conversation Analysis, developmental disfluency and others in the shape of the TalkBank Project. MacWhinney’s recent work includes studies of online learning of second language vocabulary and grammar, situationally embedded second language learning, neural network modeling of lexical development, fMRI studies of children with focal brain lesions, and ERP studies of between-language competition. He also explores the role of grammatical constructions in the marking of perspective shifting, the determination of linguistic forms across contrasting time frames, and the construction of mental models in scientific reasoning. Recent edited books include The Handbook of Language Emergence (Wiley) and Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage (Oxford).
The emergence of grammar from perspective
Carnegie Mellon UniversityHumans demonstrate a remarkable ability to take other people’s perspectives. When we watch movies, we find ourselves identifying with the actors, sensing their joys, hopes, fears, and sorrows. This system of perspective taking relies on neural processes that support body image matching, localization, empathy, and perspective tracking. These cognitive processes build upon more fundamental processes for the coordination of mind and body. Together, these mechanisms allow us to use language to update our shared mental models of the world. To do this effectively, language provides a series of cues to facilitate the construction and shifting of perspectives. These cues include a wide variety of constructions from reflexive pronouns and discourse adverbs to relative clause structures. Many of the traditional results of psycholinguistic research, such as the processing of competitive attachments and sentential ambiguities, as well as dimensions of typological analysis can be interpreted within the theory of perspective shifting. In this regard, we can see grammar as arising diachronically from repeated operation of the function of tracking perspectives during conversational interactions.References on Perspective-taking:MacWhinney, B. (2008). How mental models encode embodied linguistic perspectives. In R. Klatzky, B. MacWhinney, & M. Behrmann (Eds.), Embodiment, Ego-Space, and Action (pp. 369-410). Lawrence Erlbaum. https://psyling.talkbank.org/years/2008/perspect-symp.pdf MacWhinney, B. (2013). Using perspective to construct mental models. IEEE AMD Newsletter, 10(2), 4-6. https://psyling.talkbank.org/years/2013/dominey.pdf McDonald, J., & MacWhinney, B. (1995). The time course of anaphor resolution: Effects of implicit verb causality and gender. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 543-566. https://psyling.talkbank.org/years/1995/time.pdf MacWhinney, B., & Pléh, C. (1988). The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition, 29(2), 95-141. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90034-0MacWhinney, B. (1977). Starting points. Language, 53, 152-168. https://psyling.talkbank.org/years/1977/starting.pdf References on Emergentism more generally:MacWhinney, B., & O'Grady, W. (Eds.). (2015). The Handbook of Language Emergence. Wiley. https://www.amazon.com. MacWhinney, B. (2015). Emergentism. In E. Dabrowsksa & D. Divjak (Eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 689-706). Mouton-DeGruyter. https://psyling.talkbank.org/years/2015/dabrowska.pdf MacWhinney, B. (2014). Conclusions: Competition across time. In B. MacWhinney, A. Malchukov, & E. Moravcsik (Eds.), Competing motivations in grammar and usage (pp. 364-386). Oxford University Press. https://psyling.talkbank.org/years/2014/competing-conclusion.pdf Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)Title: Generalising active gap-fillingTime: 15:00 – 16:30, Wed, 8 Sep 2021 (Beijing, Hong Kong time)Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638 https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638
Tim Hunter is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned undergraduate degrees in Software Engineering and French at UNSW in Sydney, and completed his PhD in 2010 at the University of Maryland, College Park. His area of specialisation is computational linguistics, with a focus on how the formal study of grammars can help inform the integration of grammatical theory with psycholinguistics.Generalising active gap-fillingDepartment of Linguistics, UCLAA central issue in theories of sentence comprehension is the resolution of "long distance" dependencies. An example is the dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic direct object position in a sentence like "Which book did the teacher give to the student?". Experimental evidence across multiple methodologies indicates that human comprehenders construct these dependencies in a pro-active manner, in advance of bottom-up input that identifies the position of the missing argument ("active gap-filling", Fodor 1978).A challenge that remains outstanding is fitting these well-known experimental findings into computationally explicit models of sentence processing. Existing models provide a useful framework for understanding the online construction of structurally-local dependencies (e.g. canonical verb-argument dependencies), but are based on parsing algorithms for simple (context-free) phrase-structure grammars, and therefore cannot easily be extended to engage with the psycholinguistic work on long-distance dependencies. Attempts to bridge this divide have generally added specialised machinery that fails to generalise beyond the most familiar cases.In this talk, I will present a computationally explicit and implementable theory that addresses this challenge, and treats local and non-local dependencies in a unified manner. This proposal adapts core ideas from classical sentence processing models to less simplistic grammars, and correctly predicts some recent experimental findings comparing active gap-filling across verb-final and verb-medial languages.Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: (https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)