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2020 LSK Virtual Colloquium Series
2020 Virtual Colloquium Series on Linguistics December 14 (Monday) ~ 18 (Friday) The Linguistic Society of Korea (LSK) is organizing Virtual Colloquium Series on Linguistics in December 14~18, 2020. It will be delivered fully online, through Zoom video webinar. You can register for the event in which you are interested, by clicking the registration link below. We encourage participants to register so as to receive the zoom link on time. Each webinar is available only for 100 attendees. It will also be live streamed via Youtube.
Co-organized by: The BK 21 Program of SKKU Interaction English Studies BK 21 Project, Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University KRF Project (title: A Study of Linguistic Knowledge Using Deep Learning Models) The Konkuk Institute of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism [Abstracts] How (not) to approach the twin problems of language acquisition and evolution Cedric Boeckx (ICREA) Dec. 14 (Mon) 16:00~17:30 Linguists of a particular theoretical persuasion began to turn their attention to the problem of language evolution, claiming to have “solved” the problem of language acquisition. In the first part of the talk I will show that this approach (epitomized in Berwick and Chomsky’s “book “Why Only Us”) is mistaken. In the second part of the talk I will provide evidence that an alternative approach, which engages with other disciplines, is much more fruitful. If correct, the case I will make raises interesting questions for the future of (theoretical) linguistics, and I plan to touch on some of these at the end of the talk, and hopefully during the question period. Morphological constraints in language processing and language acquisition Harald Clahsen (Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism) This presentation will review findings from a number of experimental studies on the role of morphological constraints in language processing and language acquisition. Morphological constraints restrict the way in which inflection, derivation, and compounding interact with each other. Derivational suffixes, for example, typically appear inside inflectional ones indicating that derivation can feed inflection and not vice versa (e.g. ducklings vs. *ducksling). Recent methodological insights for word frequency data: keywords and lexical diversity Stefan Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) Word frequency data play a central role in applied corpus linguistics, especially in the form of keywords, collocations and lexical diversity. Keywords are characterised by their unusually high frequency in a given text or subcorpus, when compared against a reference corpus. They capture the aboutness of a text, highlight domain- or genre-specific vocabulary, and have been used for systematic corpus comparison. Collocations are unusually frequent co-occurrences of words, often in a direct syntactic relation such as verb-object or adjective-noun. They are a key concept in studies of phraseology and formulaic language, form the basis for distributional accounts of word meaning, and enable advanced second-language learners to become truly fluent. In the form of word sketches, they are omnipresent in modern computational lexicography. Measures of lexical diversity quantify the type-richness of word frequency distributions. They have been use to assess the size of an author's vocabulary, the stylometric complexity of literary texts, and the productivity of morphological and syntactic patterns. State of the science and methodological issues Jason Rothman (UiT The Arctic University of Norway) In this talk, I will review the nascent, yet flourishing field of studying linguistic transfer in third or more language acquisition (Rothman, González Alonso & Puig-Mayenco, 2019) with special reference to the existing formal models. I will make the case that L3 acquisition itself serves as an unrivaled natural laboratory to reveal and fully understand the dynamic nature of linguistic transfer inclusive of the manifold implications it holds for disentangling mind-language connections. The talk will also focus on epistemological and methodological issues related to best practice in testing for transfer source and why methodological choices matter so much for adjudicating between existing models and the creation of future ones. Crowd-sourced acceptability judgments: The need to ask "Why?" Carson Schütze (UCLA) The starting point for this talk is the observation, by now well-known, that when linguists seek to verify their acceptability judgments with large numbers of naive speakers via crowd-sourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, a minority of these judgments (ranging from 5% to 20% or more) will fail to replicate. Although many have been quick to draw conclusions from such results (in various directions), I argue that attempting to do so does not make sense until we ask and answer the question "Why?"—Why are subjects giving the responses they are giving? Using interviews with naive subjects after they have completed computer-based judgment tasks, I demonstrate that there are a large range of reasons why they give low ratings to sentences that linguists have considered highly acceptable and vice versa. Many of these reasons are not indicative of genuine differences in what the two populations consider (un)acceptable, but are essentially task artifacts. I propose strategies for reducing these artifacts and thus collecting data that more closely reflects linguists' intended object of study: the subject's grammar. |
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