Guest Speaker: Uli Sauerland
ABSTRACT:
"Compression within a generative view of thought and language"ÌýÌý
based on joint work with A. Alexiadou and T. Guasti
Language is generally thought to be closely related to non-linguistic thought. ÌýWe argue instead for a view where thought representations are radically compressed before linguistic articulation. Specifically, we propose that thought representations are generated independent of language and that language realizes in a compressed form ÌýInitial evidence for the account comes from syntax-semantics interface phenomena, code-mixing and -blending, expressive meaning, and historical linguistics. In this talk, I focus on ongoing work developing the approach by using data from large-scale (i.e. 30+ languages) comparisons of child language data.
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