Fw: DIP talk: Geoffrey K. Pullum (Edinburgh)

[Zuidema, Jelle]

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From: P.M....@uva.nl <P.M....@uva.nl>
Sent: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 5:00:33 PM
To: illc
Subject: DIP talk: Geoffrey K. Pullum (Edinburgh)

 

Please note the unusual time (Thursday) and venue (F2.19) for our next DiP event!

Speaker: Geoffrey K. Pullum (Edinburgh)
Title: Formalization and Prediction in Theoretical Syntax
Date: Thursday 14 March 2019
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Location: F2.19 @ ILLC

Philosophers who have taken an interest in linguistics have generally been
prepared to accept linguists' assumptions about the potential usefulness of
generative grammars in explaining human grammatical competence. Rather than
follow the radical opponents of formal linguistics, who object to the whole idea
formalized syntactic description, philosophers of linguistics debate specific
controversial points (tacit knowledge; rule-following; the relation of language and
mind) while accepting the presupposition that generative theorizing is reasonable
as an account of linguistic phenomena. This talk focuses on some of the
fundamental predictions that any generative theory inevitably entails, and argues
that those entailments are often problematic -- for explicit structural description,
cross-linguistic structural comparability, grammaticality judgments, language
acquisition, linguistic diversity, fragment intelligibility, error tolerance, sentence
production, and utterance processing. I outline and discuss a radically different
alternative mode of formalizing syntactic theories which yields more plausible
theoretical claims about human languages.