Research Groups: Week of October 1-5

Monday, October 2, 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM, PT266
Computational Linguistics Group, Department of Computer Science
Ella Rabinovich (postdoc, Department of Computer Science): "A computational approach to the study of bilingualism."
The goal of this talk is to propose and evaluate an approach for bridging the gap between two related areas of research on bilingualism: translation studies and second language acquisition. I investigate the characteristics of language production that is influenced by the existence of another linguistic system - language that is produced by a variety of multilinguals, including learners, advanced non-native speakers and translators. I ask whether these language varieties are subject to unified principles, governed by phenomena that stem from the co-existence of multiple linguistic systems in a bilingual brain. By applying a range of computational methodologies, I highlight factors that account for the commonalities and the distinctions between various crosslingual languages varieties. Major features of bilingualism, including grammatical, cognitive, and social aspects, have been extensively studied by scholars for over half a century. Crucially, much of this research has been conducted with small, carefully-curated datasets or in a laboratory experimental setup. I will show that the availability of large and diverse datasets of productions of non-native speakers stimulates new opportunities for pursuing the emerging direction of computational investigation of bilingualism, thereby tying empirical results with well-established theoretical foundations.

Wednesday, October 3, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM, Bissell Building 113
Morphology Reading Group
Sahar Taghipour (Ph.D.) will be leading a paper discussion: Stump, Gregory (forthcoming). Paradigm Function Morphology: Assumptions and innovations. In Aronoff, Mark (ed.), The Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford University Press.

Friday, October 5, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Language Variation and Change Research Group
Practise talks for NWAV 47, part 1 of 2: Naomi Nagy (faculty); Marisa Brook (faculty); Erin Hall (Ph.D.) and Ruth Maddeaux (Ph.D.).

Friday, October 5, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Phonology Research Group
TBA

Friday, October 5, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Semantics Research Group
Bruno Andreotti (Ph.D.): "Interpreting derived stative predicates: Evidence from ʔayʔajuθəm."
This presentation explores the semantic properties of a verb affix which marks stative aspect in ʔayʔajuθəm. Also known as Comox-Sliammon, ʔayʔajuθəm is a critically endangered Central Salish language spoken on the central west coast of British Columbia, Canada. The talk explores the different possible readings of this affix against what has been reported for similar morphemes in other languages. It is proposed that the different possible readings of a stativized predicate in ʔayʔajuθəm arise out of pragmatics, requiring no semantic or syntactic ambiguity, as has been proposed in previous analyses. In essence, the analysis states that derived stative predicates denote the contextually most informative and least superfluous of the states causally associated with the predicate, evaluated against a set of Questions Under Discussion. This analysis may also be applicable to adjectival participles in English.