Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Sydelle de Souza (University of Edinburgh)

Title: On the Edge of Productivity: Investigating the Acquisition, Processing, & Emergence of Semi-Productive Verb-Argument Structures

Abstract: Language processing relies on a division of labour—compositional, rule-based language is thought to be computed on the fly, while non-compositional idiomatic units are thought to be holistically stored in and retrieved from memory. Collocations (e.g., kill hope) are frequently occurring word combinations with one word used figuratively (kill) and the other literally (hope), characterised by an arbitrary restriction on substitution (#murder hope). As a result, they are neither fully compositional nor fully idiomatic. Collocations are ubiquitous in natural language and are crucial to fluency. Yet they are notoriously difficult for L2 speakers to acquire. Behavioural evidence shows that they incur a processing cost over fully compositional language as well as idioms. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms involved in collocational acquisition and processing. The overarching aim of my doctoral project is to investigate how domain-general cognitive mechanisms, data-driven learning, and cultural transmission together can account for semi-productive structures in language. In this talk, I will present some empirical data of a computational modelling experiment that investigates collocational processing as memory retrieval as well as a work-in-progress linguistic experiment that tests the validity of our definition of a collocation.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

• Elizabeth Pankratz

• Centre for Language Evolution