Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (CRISSP) and Marjo van Koppen (Universiteit Utrecht) are invited speakers at the Workshop ‘Variation in C. Macro- and Micro-comparative Approaches to Complementizers and the CP Phase’ in Venice.
They will gave a talk entitled ‘When Flanders Met Brabant: Microvariation in the Dutch C-domain’ on Wednesday 22 October 2014.
CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:
Lecturer: Jóhanna Barðdal (Ghent University)
Title: How to Identify Cognates in Syntax: Taking Watkins’ Legacy One Step Further
Date & time: Monday October 13, 2014, 17.00-18.30
Location: CRISSP/KULeuven HUBrussel, Stormstraat 2 (Hermes building), room 3101
Participation: free
Abstract:
As a reaction to three different proposals on how to reconstruct basic word order for Proto-Indo-European, Watkins and his contemporaries in the Seventies succeeded in aborting any attempt at reconstructing syntax for a long time to come. As a consequence, syntactic reconstruction has generally been regarded as a stranded enterprise by historical linguists for several different reasons, one of which is the alleged difficulty in identifying cognates in syntax. Later, Watkins (1995) proposed a research program aiming at reconstructing larger units of grammar, including syntactic structures, by means of identifying morphological flags that are parts of larger syntactic entities. As a response to this, we show how cognate argument structure constructions may be identified, through a) cognate lexical verbs, b) cognate case frames, c) cognate predicate structure and d) cognate case morphology. We then propose to advance Watkins’ program, by identifying cognate argument structure constructions with the aid of noncognate, but synonymous, lexical predicates. As a consequence, it will not only be possible to identify cognate argument structure constructions across a deeper time span, but also to carry out semantic reconstruction on the basis of lexical-semantic verb classes.
CRISSP is currently looking for a PhD student who will do scientific research in the domain of formal linguistics. More information about the project, the profile and the deadline can be found on the KU Leuven vacancy page.
Marijke De Belder will give a talk at the workshop ‘Allomorphy: its logic and limitations’ on July 6th, 2014.
Title: Feature-triggered weak suppletion in plurals
The article “Logico-cognitive structure in the lexicon” by Dany Jaspers (CRISSP / KU Leuven) and Pieter Seuren (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) will appear in the influential journal Language.
Abstract
This study is a prolegomenon to a formal theory of the natural growth of conceptual and lexical fields. Negation, in the various forms in which it occurs in language, is found to be a powerful indicator. Other than in standard logic, natural language negation selects its complement within universes of discourse that are, for practical and functional reasons, restricted in various ways and to different degrees. It is hypothesized that a system of cognitive principles drives recursive processes of universe restriction, which in turn affects logical relations within the restricted universes. This approach provides a new perspective in which to view the well-known clashes between standard logic and natural logical intuitions.
Lexicalization in language, especially the morphological incorporation of negation, is limited to highly restricted universes, which explains, for example, that a dog can be said not to be a Catholic, but not to be a non-Catholic. Cognition is taken to restrict the universe of discourse to contrary pairs, splitting up one or both of the contraries into further subuniverses as a result of further cognitive activity. It is shown how a logically sound Square of Opposition, expanded to a Hexagon, (Jacoby 1950, 1960; Sesmat 1951; Blanché 1952, 1953, 1966), is generated by a hierarchy of universe restrictions, defining the notion ‘natural’ for logical systems. The logical Hexagon contains two additional vertices, one for ‘some but not all’ (the Y-type) and one for ‘either all or ‘none’ (the U-type), and incorporates both the classic Square and the Hamiltonian Triangle of Contraries. Some is thus considered semantically ambiguous, representing two distinct quantifiers.
The pragmaticist claim that the language system contains only the standard logical ‘some perhaps all’ and that the ‘some but not all’ meaning is pragmatically derived from the use of the system is rejected. Four principles are proposed according to which negation selects a complement from the subuniverses at hand. On the basis of these principles and of the logico-cognitive system proposed, the well-known non-lexicalization not only of *nall and *nand but also of many other non-logical cases found throughout the lexicons of languages is analyzed and explained.
CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:
Lecturer: Marcos Silva (Department of Philosophy, Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Brazil)
Title: Applying truth table metaphysics to the color exclusion problem
Date & time: Monday May 12, 2014, 17.00-18.30
Location: CRISSP/KULeuven HUBrussel, Stormstraat 2 (Hermes building), room 3407
Participation: free
CRISSP is happy to announce new installments in the CRISSP Seminar series:
The Bobaljik Lectures will take place in room B-02-15 of the T’Serclaes building.
Directions:
Jonathan Bobaljik will give a series of lectures entitled “Features, Structure, and Locality in Words”. The lectures will take place on March 19-21, 2014.