- 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
Recurrences in processes with long-term memory
Eduardo G. Altmann
Since the work of Poincare on the stability of the solar system, recurrence is a fundamental concept in mathematics and physics. More recently, the time between recurrences of events of the same type has been successfully applied in the characterization of dynamical systems and time series in fields ranging from finance to earthquakes. In this seminar, I will investigate the statistics of recurrences in systems with long-term memory, drawing some formal analogies between physical systems and linguistic systems. First, I show that there is no unique correspondence between the recurrence time distribution and the auto-correlation function, shedding new light on the interpretation of previous results in the literature. Finally, I will report on an ongoing investigation of the recurrence between words in written text. It suggests that different classes of words in the same frequency range can have statistically distinct recurrence patterns. I will conclude with some speculative connections to psycholinguistic mechanisms for word choice.