Date: 08.03.2023, 09:30-10:30 Uhr
Room: Hörsaal A1,Hörsaalgebäude

Profile Mark Dingemanse (Website): Mark Dingemanse investigates how language is shaped by and for social interaction. His empirical focus is on language in its primary habitat of social interaction, where he looks at the semiotic and interactional resources people use in reaching mutual understanding and coordinating action. Methodologically, he combines field research with comparative linguistics and computational modelling. His approach is strongly collaborative and interdisciplinary, combining insights from the sciences of language, culture and mind. Among other things, his work has led to the discovery of some potential pragmatic universals of conversational infrastructure. Dingemanse thus approaches the interaction of creativity and routine in language from the perspective of the social situation —the primordial ecology of language— and thus covers an important area in the exploration of the conference's framework topic.

Abstract: When we laud the supreme generativity and expressivity of language, we rarely stop to think about the full range of resources that underpin it. Received views tend to focus on our remarkable mental capacities for composition and decomposition, a cognitivist perspective that makes it easy to overlook the contributions of public interaction. In this talk I presents some results from a research programme that tries to round out the picture by exploring how language is shaped by and for social interaction. I sketch how interjections —long overlooked as mere performance— are streamlined and conventionalized tools that help streamline linguistic interaction and scaffold language development. I also show how interactional resources like repair and continuers provide us with an infrastructure to balance creativity and convention in turn-by-turn interaction. The research I report on is part of the NWO-funded project Elementary Particles of Conversation and represents joint work with colleagues including Marieke Woensdregt, Andreas Liesenfeld, Marlou Rasenberg and Ada Lopez.

Date: 08.03.2023, 11:30-12:30 Uhr
Room: Hörsaal A1, Hörsaalgebäude

Profile Jennifer Culbertson (Website): Jennifer Culbertson's research is devoted to the question of how languages are shaped by learning and use. She investigates how typological universals, for instance frequency differences of linguistic patterns in the languages of the world, arise from properties of our cognitive apparatus. Methodologically, she approaches this question by means of miniature artificial languages learned by children and adults whose behaviour is modelled computationally. Jennifer Culbertson's research thus contributes to the study of the interplay between linguistic creativity and routine by examining cognitively determined routines and creative deviations from these routines during acquisition, with a probabilistic approach being central.

Abstract: A foundational goal of linguistics has been to understand why languages look the way they do. A range of possible explanations exist---from domain-specific representations to cognition-external factors like history and grammaticalization---and all of these undoubtedly play some role. But determining exactly how these link with specific typological patterns remains challenging, and the role of domain-specific mechanisms has been particularly contentious. In this talk, I highlight a growing new approach, which uses artificial language experiments to link individual-level biases to cross-linguistic trends in language structure. Using word and morpheme order as case studies, I will show how a range of different paradigms and learner populations allow us to make progress on this crucial issue in the cognitive science of language. For some ordering patterns, experimental evidence points to variation across populations, suggesting that the best explanation for these patterns likely has its roots in language history and grammaticalization. In other cases, the evidence points to the role of universal but domain-general cognitive biases, like transparency and simplicity. These domain-general biases interact with linguistic representations in important ways. Taken together these studies help adjudicate between alternative explanations for a number of specific typological patterns, and suggest a new sense of domain-specificity in the evolution of language.

Date: 10.03.2023, 09-10 Uhr
Room: Hörsaal A1, Hörsaalgebäude

Profile Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (Website): Nikolaus P. Himmelmann’s main research interests are typology, grammaticisation, discourse and conversation analysis, and language documentation and description, with a special focus on Austronesian and, more recently, Papuan languages. He has done field work in the Philippines, Indonesia and East Timor, since 2009 working closely together with the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation in Manokwari (West Papua). He has a strong interest in questions of methodology, in particular the quality of the data that provide the basis for cross linguistic generalizations. One aspect of particular interest in this regard is prosody and the prosody-syntax interface, as understanding prosody is essential for taken spoken language seriously.

Nikolaus P. Himmelmann currently is Professor in General Linguistics at the University Cologne, where he also functions as the spokesperson for the Key Profile Area Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition. He has published widely on morphosyntactic topics (e.g. parts of speech, secondary predicates, demonstratives and deictics more generally, word order, the suffixing preference), the grammaticisation of phrase structure and grammaticisation theory, language documentation and prosodic chunking (intonation units).

Abstract: In principle, the mapping between grammatical and prosodic units at the level of the intonation unit (IU) is flexible: IUs may be as short as a single syllable and as long as a chain of rapidly delivered clauses. On the other hand, there are strong tendencies in that, for example, many IUs consist of a single clause, and many clauses occur in an IU of their own. Mapping relations at the prosody-syntax interface hence provide a rich source for modelling the interplay between creativity and routine in linguistic interaction.

The main focus of the talk will be on ways for “playing with” prosodic boundaries as a prime example of linguistic creativity. Creativity presupposes a default (a standard way for placing and producing an IU boundary) and possibilities to circumvent this default, thereby creating a special effect. Examples come from a range of different languages and linguistic areas.

Date: 10.03.2023, 10-11 Uhr
Room: Hörsaal A1, Hörsaalgebäude

Profile Fernanda Ferreira (Website): Fernanda Ferreira's psycholinguistic research is dedicated to speech processing and speech production. Building on key insights from theoretical linguistics, especially in the areas of phonology and syntax, her goal is to model the psycholinguistic mechanisms that enable people to understand and produce language in real time as well as in interaction with other cognitive systems. Her methodological spectrum includes behavioural and neural measures, such as eye movement recording and event-related brain potentials. A highly influential concept developed by Fernanda Ferreira is that of good-enough parsing, which accounts for the observation that during speech comprehension, people often think they have understood an utterance if they can extract something plausible from the utterance, regardless of whether it was actually said or not. In recent research, Ferreira looks further into misunderstandings and 'faulty' communication. Thus, her research is highly relevant to the interaction of creativity and routines, as errors are deviations from routines and thus, in a sense, creativity. Her research thus represents an essential building block for the exploration of the conference's framing theme.

Abstract: Psycholinguists have traditionally assumed that although people sometimes flail and struggle as they work to understand a sentence, they will almost always eventually succeed in obtaining the interpretation mandated by the sentence’s form. Similarly, speakers might expend some effort planning and choosing what to say, but eventually they will succeed in finding a linguistic form that captures their communicative intentions. In recent years, both these assumptions have been challenged: In the are area of comprehension, models increasingly acknowledge the importance of good-enough or noisy channel processing; and in production, new approaches acknowledge the reality that sometimes speakers’ utterances are barely “good enough” to convey their thoughts, and occasionally speakers don’t even quite know what they want to say until they start speaking. To a large extent, these tendencies are attributable to the use of routines or familiar, prepackaged linguistic sequences that allow people to get close to their communicative goals while managing the time and social pressures associated with real-world interactions. But it is often also important for language comprehenders and producers to be creative and flexible, and to adapt to current circumstances, requiring them to overcome these pre-potent routines and processing biases. In this presentation I will focus on how current research speaks to the interplay of these two pressures in comprehension and production, and I will suggest some avenues for future research.