September 26, 2018

Research Groups: Friday, September 28

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Wilson Hall 523
Psycholinguistics Group
Katharina Rohlfing (University of Paderborn): "Collaborative and multimodal endeavour of language learning."
So far in the research, the problem of learning a word was presented mostly in an intrapersonal way: a child has to map a word onto a concept. In this presentation, I will present an alternative to this approach: word learning is not only a matter of the learner. Instead, it is a joint and collaborative endeavor. Consequently, words are used for specific action goals – especially in early development. This view affords not only a change of theoretically conceptualizing word learning but also a change of methods. Departing from the theory summarized in Rohlfing et al. (2016) under the conception of Pragmatic Frames, I will exemplify the methodological challenge on turn-taking, which – so far – was investigated mostly as unimodal but should be considered as a multimodal phenomenon. Analyzing a corpus of mother-child dyads applying Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis and frequent pattern mining, solutions to the assessment of human sequential behavior will be presented with respect to the questions of (i) how multimodal turn-taking spreads across different modalities and (ii) how it is co-constructed with a partner.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Syntax Group
Nicholas LaCara (faculty): "Modal complement anaphora and the distribution of parenthetical gaps."
English as-parentheticals can contain gaps where verb phrases normally appear. I have argued previously that these gaps are the result of VP ellipsis (VPE) in the parenthetical. In this talk, I look outside of English to see whether other putatively elliptical operations can create gaps in as-parentheticals, concentrating on Modal Complement Anaphora (MCA) in Romance. The results of this investigation seem to show that gaps can occur only where MCA can delete material, but it is not always possible to use MCA in a parenthetical. That is, MCA may not occur as freely as VPE does in English. I do not yet know why.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Fieldwork Group
Brief, informal presentations about fieldwork expeditions that group members went on this past summer.

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