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Congratulations to LYNSEY WOLTER who presented "Fall-Rise, Topic, and Speaker Commitment" at the recent WECOL (WEstern Conference on Linguistics), held in Vancouver on Nov. 2, 2002. The Paper will be forthcoming in the proceedings.
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Congratulations to VERA LEE-SCHOENFELD, who successfully defended her syntax QP Monday:
"Non-Complementarity in German AcI-Constructions"
>From the committee: Judith, Jim, and Jorge
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Congratulations to ANDY WEDEL who has been awarded an Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) Dissertation Fellowship for spring quarter, 2003.
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Congratulations to ANNE STURGEON who is the recipient of two grants from the IHR: a dissertation fellowship to be used next school year and a research grant which she will use to work with Czech consultants on dissertation research.
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Congratulations to FLORENCE WOO who received an IHR research and travel grant again this year for summer fieldwork on Nuuchahnulth verbal system.
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GEOFF PULLUM is back in town (briefly) after a visit to Rovira i Virgili
University in Tarragona, Spain, where he gave 18 hours of lectures on
mathematical linguistics and one lecture about The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language. On the way home he stopped in Barcelona to give
another lecture at Pompeu Fabra University, academic home of our own
PhD alumna LOUISE McNALLEY, who gave a lengthy introduction in amazingly
fluent and native-like Catalan. Afterwards much consuming of tapas was
done and many beers were quaffed -- in the company of our own DYLAN
HERRICK, who is doing research on Catalan phonology there right now
-- and Louise gave instructions for her best wishes to be conveyed back
here to all those who know her. This is hereby done.
On December 1, Geoff leaves for a longer lecture trip, to give talks
in England (the University of Essex, (the University of Sussex, (the
University of Manchester, and (University College London), Egypt (the
annual EgypTESOL conference in Cairo), Singapore (a plenary talk at the
congress of the International Association of Applied Linguistics), and
Malaysia (a four-hour workshop on The Cambridge Grammar for teachers of
English in Kuala Lumpur). And back in time for Christmas of course.
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WORKSHOP WITH GERHARD JAEGER
Wednesday, December 4, 2002
3:30 p.m.
Linguistics Graduate Commons Building (the "cave")
Title: Evolutionary Optimality Theory
Abstract: In the talk I will propose a variant of Boersma's Gradual
Learning Algorithm for Stochastic Optimality Theory. While in the
original version the learner is always (or tries to become) a speaker, I
assume that the learner is both speaker and hearer. This learning theory
is applied to the OT system from Aissen (2000), which was developed to
explain the typology of differential case marking. It can be shown that
the constraint sub-hierarchies that Aissen assumes to be universal
follow from the statistical patterns of language use that have been
uncovered in several corpus studies, if one adopts the bidirectional
learning approach.
Not all case marking patterns are learnable by the Bidirectional Gradual
Learning Algorithm (BiGLA), and some patterns are easier to learn than
others. If learning with limited resources is repeated over several
generations, one can distinguish stable and instable language types, and
certain tendencies for language change emerge. In the second part of the
talk I will present and discuss some experimental findings on the basis
of this evolutionary approach.
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New in the LRC Library:
Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics.Volume 26, 2002.
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HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!
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