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Linguistics Forum

Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Schedule of Talks

Upcoming Events

On Thursday, 30th May 2019, the Cambridge Linguistics Forum (CLF) has the pleasure to host Prof Anita Mehta (University of Oxford), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Language dynamics - what we hear and how we hear it'.

Time - Thursday 30th May, 4.30-6pm
(There will be a coffee reception on the ground floor from 4pm.)
Venue - English Faculty Building, SR-24 (second floor)

Abstract
Language dynamics - what we hear and how we hear it

Speech perception and the evolution of languages have a long and rich history in the domain of linguistics research. I will, in this talk, present a physicist's take on aspects of each of these two topics. In the first part, I'll describe a minimal model of the way in which a listener deciphers a string of sounds and tries to reconstruct a word, both with and without mishearings. This will lead to a phase diagram with a separation between regions of easy and hard decipherability. In the second part of the talk, I'll describe a model of the evolution of participles, and show that the inclusion of true dynamical competition does better than Ringe and Yang's threshold principle (2016) in explaining the survival of particular forms. The last part of this talk concerns the data analysis of a study of audiovisual cognition in a mixed-literacy population, where the use of fluctuations, rather than averages, is able to produce good data collapse from initially rather noisy data.

 

Past Events

 

18 January

Freek Van de Velde (University of Leuven)

Faculty sponsor: Dr David Willis

Research area:  Mechanisms of Language Change

Title: Languages adapt to minute differences in their speakers’ ecology

View abstract

Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)


1 February 

Harald Baayen (University of Tübingen)

Faculty sponsor: Dr Jim Blevins

Research area:  Computational Linguistics

Title: Using quantile regression and dynamic survival analysis to study the time course of the lexical processing of complex words

View abstract

Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)


15 February

Roberto Sileo

Faculty sponsor: Prof Kasia Jaszczolt

Research area:  Semantics, Pragmatics & Philosophy

Title: The Semantics and Pragmatics of racial and ethnic language: towards a comprehensive radical contextual account

View abstract

Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)


1 March

Teresa Bajo (University of Granada)

Faculty sponsor: Prof Ianthi Tsimpli

Research area:  Language Acquisition & Language Processing

Title: Sources of Variability in Language Activation and Control in Spanish/English bilinguals and L2 learners

View abstract

Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)


26 March

Jim McCloskey (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Faculty sponsor: Prof Ian Roberts

Research area:  Comparative Syntax

Title: Understanding Ellipsis: Corpus, Annotation, Theory

View abstract

Venue (time): GR-06/07 (4-5:30pm)


26 April

Prof Richard 'Dick' Hudson (Retired, UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences)

Faculty sponsor: Dr N Katsos, Dr B Post, Prof I Roberts

Research area: Relevant to all of TAL

Title: Linguistics and education: a case of mutual dependency?

View abstract

Venue (time): GR-06/07 (4-5:30pm)


17 May - This talk has been POSTPONED to the next academic year.

Margaret Kehoe (University of Geneva)

Faculty sponsor: Dr Brechtje Post

Research area:  Experimental Phonetics & Phonology

Title: Seeking cross-linguistic interaction in the phonetic and phonological development of bilingual French-speaking children

View abstract

Venue (time): TBA


31 May

Devyani Sharma (Queen Mary University of London)

Faculty sponsor: Prof Ianthi Tsimpli

Research area:  Language Acquisition & Language Processing

Title: Syntactic Change in Postcolonial Englishes: Substrates and Input

View abstract

Venue (time): English Faculty Building, 2nd FL, Room 24; (4-5:30pm)