There will be a special talk by Uli Sauerland on Friday October 11, 15:30-17:00 in Sherbrooke 688, Room 491. Title and abstract below, all are welcome!
“Compression within a generative view of thought and language” (based on joint work with A. Alexiadou and T. Guasti)
Language is generally thought to be closely related to non-linguistic thought. We argue instead for a view where thought representations are radically compressed before linguistic articulation. Specifically, we propose that thought representations are generated independent of language and that language realizes in a compressed form Initial evidence for the account comes from syntax-semantics interface phenomena, code-mixing and -blending, expressive meaning, and historical linguistics. In this talk, I focus on ongoing work developing the approach by using data from large-scale (i.e. 30+ languages) comparisons of child language data.