When:
Friday, December 5, 2014
3:30 PM - 6:00 PM CT
Where: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster St, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Department of Linguistics
(847) 491-7020
Group: Linguistics Colloquium
Category: Academic
The mental status of derivational operations
In this talk I present an approach to integrating generative syntax with information-theoretic sentence complexity metrics, from which it follows that two grammars that are extensionally equivalent --- two grammars which produce the same structures, and differ only in what primitive derivational operations they use to build those structures --- can nonetheless give rise to distinct predictions concerning sentence comprehension difficulty. This provides a linking hypothesis that connects sentence processing observations to subtle questions about the derivational operations that comprise human grammars (merge, move, re-merge, agree, etc.). Competing answers to these sorts of fine-grained questions can therefore be understood as competing claims about cognitive machinery even if they fail to make distinct predictions about acceptability judgement data.