- 1:00 Welcome by Mike Hammond
- Introductory remarks by Andy Wedel
Friday, April 25, 2008: Harvill rm. 115
- 1:15 - 2:15 Harry Tily
- Diachronic processing preferences and their implications for models of syntactic change
- 2:15 – 3:15 Neal Snider
- An exemplar model of syntactic production
Tea Break
- 3:30 – 4:30 Joan Bresnan
- Predicting Syntax: Processing Dative Constructions in Two Varieties of English
- 4:30 – 5:30 Discussion
Dinner at Poca Cosa
- 8:30 Coffee
Saturday, April 26, 2008: Harvill rm. 102
- 8:45 – 9:45 Rob Malouf, Farrell Ackerman and Jim Blevins
- Inflectional morphology as a complex adaptive system
- 9:45 – 10:45 Melissa Redford
- Meaning and Mechanics in Speech and Language Acquisition
Tea Break
- 11:00 – 12:00 Eduardo Altmann
- Recurrences in processes with long-term memory
Lunch
- 1:30—2:30 Robert Daland
- Language variation: convergence, divergence and death
- 2:30 – 3:30 Colin Dawson
- 'Second-Order Learning' as a Source of Structure Stabilization in Both Individual Learning and Cultural Evolution
Tea Break
- 3:45 – 4:45 Andy Wedel
- Modeling sublexical contrast maintenance as an emergent effect of lexical category competition
- 4:45 – 5:45 Clay Beckner and Andy Wedel
- Modeling contributions of usage versus acquisition to language change
Department Potluck party at 7 at Adam Ussishkin and Andy Wedel’s house
Modeling sublexical contrast maintenance as an emergent effect of lexical category competition
Andy Wedel
The transmission of information requires a contrastive code. Standard linguistic models locate the building blocks of contrast in a set of atomic sound categories which in combination subserve contrast between higher order sound-meaning categories, such as words. The mechanism of contrast maintenance between these atomic sound categories through the course of language change has been unclear, particularly given that contrast has its function at higher, sound-meaning category levels. However, given the growing body of evidence indicating that variation is recorded at multiple levels of organization. I argue here that contrast maintenance may arise instead at the sound-meaning level through usage, producing an indirect, non-teleological mechanism for selection for contrast at the level of sound categories. As an example, I show that variant trading between categories competing for percepts results in categorial contrast maintenance, and that within simulations, sound category contrast can arise epiphenomenally through word category competition.