Dear all,
The Linguistics Colloquium Series is having a talk next Friday, 11/18, in Oak 112, at 4:00pm.
We would like to invite you to join us and see Prof. David Lightfoot's (Georgetown University) talk 'Triggers and dominoes'. The abstract is attached below.
Information about the speaker can be found here: http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/lightd/
The Linguistics Colloquium Series is a student-organized event sponsored by the UConn Department of Linguistics and the UConn Graduate Student Senate.
We hope to see you there!
Gabriel & Paula
Abstract:
•Generativists often see children acquiring their I-language by flicking on/off switches on binary parameters and evaluating the generative capacity of I-languages against a corpus of sentences. Such ideas are problematic and invite alternatives.
•Here I argue that children parse E-language and postulate specific I-language elements required for certain aspects of the parse. The aggregation of elements constitutes the complete I-language. When E-language shifts, children may parse differently and thus attain a new I-language, as revealed in work on syntactic change. Children DISCOVER variable properties of their I-languages through parsing; there is no evaluation of I-languages and no binary parameters. This will enable us to understand a sequence of changes to the I-languages of speakers of English.
For more information, contact: Paula Fenger at paula.fenger@uconn.edu