- 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
Inflectional morphology as a complex adaptive system
Rob Malouf, Farrell Ackerman and Jim Blevins
Research on complex adaptive systems is predicated on a fundamental distinction between complicated versus complex phenomena, a distinction that is often conflated in morphological research. Miller & Page 2007:41 provide a useful characterization of this distinction:
"In a complicated world, the various elements that make up the system maintain a degree of independence form one another. Thus, removing one such element, which reduces the level of complication does not fundamentally alter the system's behavior apart from that which directly resulted from the piece that was removed. Complexity arises when the dependencies among the elements become importantŠ Complexity is a deep property of a system, whereas complication is notŠ When a scientist faces a complicated world, traditional tools that rely on reducing the system to it's atomic elements allow us to gain insight. Unfortunately, using these same tools to understand complex worlds fails, because it becomes impossible to to reduce the system without killing it."
We extend into the morphological domain several aspects of the research program of Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2005, 2006, Blevins & Wedel 2008, Yu 2007, among others). We explore a particular question for inflectional morphological systems which we refer to as the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem. This can be formulated as follows: What licences reliable inferences about the surface wordforms for the inflectional families of wordforms associated with (classes of) lexeme? In effect, given exposure to a novel inflected or derived wordform what predicts the shape of all related wordforms? We address this question by developing two assumptions. First, words are construed as recombinant gestalts: complex wordforms are ensembles of (sometimes recurrent) elements which themselves need not be meaningful but are reliably associated in configurations with specific, identifiable meanings. In other words, the basic meaning bearing elements are words. Second, words participate in networks of relatedness, i.e. paradigms, in which members of paradigms bear implicational relations to one another in a dynamic network of word relatedness. We calculate the implicational (predictive) value of particular forms or collections of forms using the measure of conditional entropy (Milan et. al. to appear). Using previous results and insights based on the analysis of complex nominal declension systems in Saami, Finnish, and Nenets (Ackerman, Blevins & Malouf (to appear)), we develop simulations to explore the hypothesis that paradigm organization is best viewed as a complex adaptive system. In general, we argue that an implicative theory of morphology grounded in analogy (see Thyme 1994, Thyme, Ackerman, Elman 1994, Hughes & Ackerman 2001, Blevins 2005, 2006, Finkal & Stump 2006, Stump & Finkal (to appear), Ackerman, Stump & Webelhuth (to appear)), is crucial for explaining the organization of inflectional systems, and, presumably, their learnability.