Linguistics Lecture Series

On the 17th, the talk will start at 6:00PM as usual and then we will have a reception in the seminar room. (The place will be Humanities 1006)

On the 18th, we will have lunch with the speaker at 12:30PM and the talk will be at SAC 303 at 3:30PM.
Around 6:00PM, we will have dinner at Lori's house. This will be like a colloquium reception.

If you are interested in having a meeting with the speaker, let us know.
And let the students in your classes know these talks and invite them, please.

We hope you will enjoy this semester's linguistics lecture series.

Lenneberg’s Dream in our Time: Development, Learning and the Search for a Genetics of Language

Location: Humanities 1006

The study of language development today is among the most vibrant of the cognitive sciences, with stunning empirical results and many connections to other sciences, including linguistics, genetics and brain imaging. What causes language development in the child? Of course, much is learned, for example, particular words. What else is learned? What is caused by biology? What develops late or early under biological guidance?

Arrows, Pizza, and Language: Grammar as a Cultural Tool

Comparative Measure Phrases
Dr. Akira Watanabe, University of Tokyo

In this talk, I suggest that the cooccurrence restrictions found in the syntax of comparison (ex. more - than and as - as) should not be treated as a matter of selection as in the traditional analysis but must be captured in terms of agreement. In arguing for this proposal, I focus on comparative measure phrases found in expressions like taller than seven feet. As part of this discussion, I will venture into decomposition of antonymous pairs of dimensional adjectives.

The relation(s) between linguistics and neurobiology

David Poeppel
Department of Linguistics & Department of Biology
University of Maryland College Park

The enthusiasm for neurobiological research into the basis of language suggests that progress is being made regarding our understanding of how the brain computes with linguistic representations. Is this enthusiasm warranted? In which domains of brain-language relations is there credible progress? While there are grounds for optimism that we are beginning to understand where to look in the brain, we do not understand very much at all about how linguistic representations and computations are implemented -- the putative goal of the overall research program. Recent experimental work using different brain imaging methodologies will exemplify how complex the (many) relations between brain organization and language architecture are (the 'granularity problem'), and in which areas of inquiry there is hope for genuine interdisciplinary insight into the mechanisms that form the basis for language processing.