Workshop: Morphological Typology and Linguistic Cognition

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The workshop supported by this award will bring together linguists and researchers from related disciplines to discuss lexical morphology (how grammars create complex word forms) and morphological variation across the world's languages. Language typology is the field of scientific study that investigates how languages are similar to and different from each other. Previous work has produced much information about how languages differ, but no clear consensus about why. Why do some languages tend to use simple, individual words to convey each bit of meaning? Why do other languages build complex words that are equivalent to entire sentences? (English is somewhere in the middle.) And especially, why do languages differ so significantly in this way, when all humans are born with the same mental 'tools' for producing, understanding and learning language? The relationship between language diversity globally and the individual speaker's mental 'toolbox' is particularly important. Research in this area is foundational to the following goals: (i) developing expert speakers of foreign languages that are important to the national interest; (ii) improving adults' ability in general to acquire languages successfully; and (iii) creating tools and resources (e.g. automatic computer translations) for under-resourced languages. This grant funds a two-day conference that will connect language diversity to the mental tools that individual speakers have for producing, understanding and learning language. Do the ways that people mentally organize and process language lead to the similarities and differences that are observed across languages? If so, how? The conference will advance understanding of how languages differ, evaluate hypotheses about the reasons for similarities and differences, and identify new paths for investigation. The conference will bring together researchers who work in different areas--language diversity, how words are stored and organized in the human mind, and computational methods for modeling language structure. By bringing together researchers with different expertise, this conference will offer new ways to think about language diversity and its relationship to the individual. It will also play an important role in training a new generation of scholars. Almost half of invited speakers are junior scholars, the conference organizing committee includes graduate students, and the conference will offer travel grants so that students can present and learn about cutting-edge research.