[PLing] Guest talks by Hestvik and Johnsen, 13 December 2019

[Dalina Kallulli]

Dear colleagues,
You are cordially invited to attend two guest talks at the Department of Linguistics on Friday, 13 December. The first talk, by Arild Hestvik (Delaware), starts at 1 o’clock, and the second one, by Lars Johnsen (Oslo), starts at 3 o’clock -- see titles and abstracts below. Both talks will take place in Seminarraum 2, Sensengasse 3a, 1.OG.
Regards,
Dalina Kallulli

1. Guest speaker Arild Hestvik (Delaware): "Can cognitive neuroscience provide evidence for Quantifier Raising?"

I present joint work with Bilge Palaz and Ryan Rhodes, where we use measures of brain activity that is sensitive to stages of processing, to argue that sentences with negation (and by conjecture, quantifiers in general) are processed in two stages, where the first stage has the quantifier removed by QR, and the second stage has the truth-value determined by applying the quantifier. We present evidence for the two stages of processing as well as somewaht more tentative evidence that negation is in a scope position and establishing a dependency from that position. This work harks back to Clark and Chase 1972, Fichler et al 1982, and recent work by Nieuwland and Kuperberg (2008) and more.

Clark, H. H., & Chase, W. G. (1972). On the process of comparing sentence agaist pictures. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 472–517.
Fischler, I., Bloom, P. A., Childers, D. G., Roucos, S. E., & Perry, N. W. (1983). Brain Potentials Related to Stages of Sentence Verification. Psychophysiology, 20(4), 400–409. 
Nieuwland, M. S., & Kuperberg, G. R. (2008). When the Truth Is Not Too Hard to Handle: An Event-Related Potential Study on the Pragmatics of Negation. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1213–1218. https://doi.org/10.2307/40064867 <https://doi.org/10.2307/40064867>

2. Guest speaker Lars Johnsen (Oslo): "Generative Grammer meets Corpus”

Within generative grammar, Chomsky  has a long history of disimissing corpus studies. One can't advance linguistics, or get insights into i-language, by trying to generalize from e-language. Science (all of it) needs experiments, and cannot move forward just by looking at manifest phenomena. We will take this view as our departure, and show that experiments indeed can be done using newer and large corpora as a resource for tools of information processing. Corpora can be utilized for the discovery of patterns as well as being part in explanations of grammatical phenomena. We will specifically look at different ways of making collocations, and how distributional semantics play a role in language models.

--
Assoz. Prof. Dr. Dalina Kallulli
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Wien
Sensengasse 3a, Raum O6.10, 1090 Wien
Tel.: +43-1-4277 41732
Email: dalina.kallulli at univie.ac.at
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/dalina.kallulli/

-------------- n�chster Teil --------------
Ein Dateianhang mit HTML-Daten wurde abgetrennt...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20191202/bd221517/attachment.html>