Colloquium Feb. 18: Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology.

The department is hosting a colloquium this Friday, February 18th with guest speaker Jennifer Culbertson (University of Edinburgh)! 

Culbertson will be speaking on the topic of Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology. Abstract is shared below. 

If you are interested in attending, please contact Avery Ozburn (Faculty and Colloquium Committee Member) for the Zoom login information.

Learning and the Emergence of (Morpho-)Syntactic Typology

One of the most controversial hypotheses in linguistics is that individual-level biases in learning shape language typology at the population-level. While this hypothesis has been around a long time, it has often been supported by less than robust empirical evidence. In this talk, I present a number of studies aimed at providing new sources of evidence linking learning to key features of language. In the first part of the talk, I focus on a classic set of "language universals" which describe common word order patterns. One such pattern is word order harmony, the tendency for syntactic heads and dependents to align across phrases within a language. While harmony has long been claimed to have some special cognitive status, there is also compelling evidence that it may be driven by cognition-external processes of language change. I show that harmony is in fact favoured during learning, influencing how adults and children make inferences under noisy learning conditions, and how they extrapolate to new constructions. I then turn to a more complex pattern of word order which has been proposed to derive from constraints on syntactic representations. I report experimental and quantitative corpus-based evidence to suggest an alternative explanation of this pattern, but one nevertheless driven by learning. In the second part of the talk, I discuss the role of learning in shaping morphosynactic patterns like grammatical gender. I argue that the different biases of children and adults during learning work together to constrain how such patterns emerge and change over time. Finally, I discuss the implications of this work for linguistic theories and models of language evolution.