CRISSP member Marijke De Belder will be giving a talk at CGSW30. Jeroen van Craenenbroeck is an invited speaker at the conference.
CRISSP member Tanja Temmerman will be giving a talk at CGSW30 on 22 May:
CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Seminar with Michael Cysouw on Monday June 1, 2015.
Title: Language comparison through massively parallel texts
Abstract
A central goal of general linguistics is to try and make statements about human language in general, and not just for a few, widely studied languages. There currently exists a range of different methodologies to investigate and compare many disparate languages. However, the central problem of comparability always raises its ugly head: how do we make sure that we are comparing like with like across languages? As a solution to the problem of comparability, I propose to use massively parallel texts, i.e. the same text translated into many different languages (cf. http://paralleltext.info). I will present a few basic examples of how parallel texts can be used for language comparison and discuss possible future directions of this kind research.
The program for BCGL 8: The Grammar of Idioms is now available. You can consult it on the following web page:
BCGL 8 will take place in Brussels on June 4 and June 5, 2015. For more information, see the conference website on https://www.crissp.be/bcgl8.
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck will give 4 talks in the following months:
The schedule for the Sprouse Lectures has changed; check the lectures page for up to date information.
CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Lecture Series with Jon Sprouse (University of Connecticut) on March 16-18, 2015. The title of the Lecture Series is ‘A program for experimental syntax: data, theory, and biology’.
Abstract
Over the past 15 years or so, the use of formal experimental methods has steadily gained popularity in theoretical linguistics. The question I’d like to address in this series is exacly how these methods can further the goals of syntactic theory. To that end, I will attempt to lay out a comprehensive research agenda that highlights the types of questions that I think formal methods are particularly well-suited to address. I will divide these questions into three types, roughly corresponding to each day of the lecture series: (i) questions about the data underlying syntactic theories (data), (ii) questions about the nature of syntactic theories (theory), and finally (iii) questions about the mentalistic consequences of syntactic theories (biology). For each topic, I will present a mix of old and new case studies, primarily based on acceptability judgment experiments, with at least one EEG experiment and one computational model thrown in for good measure. My hope is that these case studies will stimulate discussion about how we can push each of these research threads even further in the future.
CRISSP (KU Leuven) and UiL OTS (Universiteit Utrecht), as part of the joint NWO/FWO project ‘The Syntax of Idioms’, are proud to present the 8th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics: The grammar of idioms.
Workshop description
According to the Fregean principle of compositionality, the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the rules used to combine them. This principle is flouted in the case of idioms (cf. Katz & Postal 1963; Fraser 1970; Katz 1973; Chomsky 1980; Machonis 1985; Schenk 1994; Grégoire 2009; among others). Every language contains idiomatic expressions which, by definition, denote a meaning that is not simply derivable from (the combination of) the meanings of the individual lexical items of that expression. A canonical example is kick the bucket, the meaning of which has nothing to do with either kicking or buckets; it simply means ‘to die’. The existence of such expressions within natural language gives rise to many questions which have puzzled linguists for years, such as how these phrases are formed syntactically, whether they are restricted to certain structural domains, or how it is that we are able to deduce the idiomatic interpretation of such phrases despite there being no clues as to their meanings within any of the individual lexical items that comprise these expressions.
The purpose of this workshop is to discuss and explore the phenomenon of idioms with the aim of gaining better theoretical and empirical insights into how such expressions are able to occur within natural language, and what sorts of rules of language they are governed by.
In 2014, CRISSP organized the 37th GLOW colloquium. The videos of the talks are now available at http://www.glow37.org/videos/.