43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages: Special Session on Romance Parsed Corpora-New York City - April, 2013

Cuny College Of Staten Island, Staten Island NY

Investigators

Abstract

The principal object of study for a core area of Linguistics is the individual speaker's knowledge of his/her native language, or "grammar." Given that a speaker's knowledge of grammar is unconscious, a challenge for the discipline is to develop reliable methodologies that uncover the right data and enhance replicability. "Parsed corpora" projects are an important component in an emerging methodology being used to uncover the syntactic patterns underlying speakers' use of language. These are texts, both written and spoken, which are annotated with detailed grammatical information, and then used as tools to test hypotheses about statistical tendencies in syntactic patterning. While there is a rapidly growing body of Germanic parsed corpora in the discipline, there have been equally important developments in parsed corpora in Romance. With support from the National Science Foundation, a "Special Session on Parsed Corpora of Romance languages" will be held at the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL43), April 17-19, 2013, at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. As the largest annual gathering of linguists working on Romance languages, the LSRL affords the perfect occasion to make the Romance linguistics community aware of some of the most exciting recent advances in syntax, which are based on these innovative tools. The objective is to provide a focused discussion of how these parsed corpora can be used as tools by anyone in the discipline, and to thereby foster scientific activity. The Session will include three one-hour talks on both historical and synchronic parsed corpora in Romance languages: (1) the "Modelling Change: The Paths of French" corpus, presented by Anthony Kroch and Beatrice Santorini (University of Pennsylvania), (2) the "Syntax-oriented corpus of Portuguese dialects," presented by Ana Maria Martins (University of Lisbon), and (3) the "Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese," presented by Charlotte Galves (University of Campinas).