Workshop on Approaches to Slavic Morphology

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

One of the main goals of linguistics is to understand the human mind by studying what languages have in common and how they differ. These commonalities and differences identify features of human cognition that might be innate, and features that arise through learning. This nature-nurture divide is striking in the area of morphology, the study of word structure. The word structure of languages such as English is relatively simple--a noun can have three different forms ('book', 'books', 'book's'), and verbs can have up to four ('write', 'writes', 'wrote', 'written'). On the other hand, languages in the Slavic family, which includes Czech, Russian, Serbian, are notorious for their morphological complexity--a noun can have up to fourteen forms, and verbs can have as many as sixty. Yet linguists have shown that there are parallels between the structure of sentences in languages such as English and the structure of complex words in morphologically rich languages such as Slavic. Some linguists believe that these parallels are due to the structure of the innate language faculty of the human mind, but others argue that the similarities can arise because of the way humans learn complex patterns, and these learning mechanisms are not necessarily specific to language. The science of linguistics resolves such debates by investigating the structure of languages and language families in detail, and by supporting different theories with experiments and computational simulations of human language learning. This proposal is for a Special Workshop on Approaches to Slavic Morphology, which will be held as part of the annual conference Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics--the premier venue for research on Slavic languages in North America. While the conference is in its twenty-fourth year, it has never included a morphology workshop. The workshop will feature three invited speakers who have made major contributions to research on morphology in general and Slavic in particular. There will be eight additional talks accepted based on anonymous, competitive review. The workshop will bring together a variety of perspectives on morphology, bringing together researchers who specialize in Slavic on the one hand and morphology on the other. Participants will be encouraged to present research that addresses fundamental questions about the relationship between meaning, sound, and word structure. The workshop will highlight the research of three junior women scholars. It will furthermore offer students training in conference organization, as well as subsidize their participation in the workshop.