Week of February 18, 2013

Language Universals Workshop

Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Locality and processing long-distance reflexives
Wednesday, February 20 | 5:15-7pm | Polinsky Lab Room 420 (Conference Room)

It has been widely noted that syntactic comprehension is subject to locality or recency effects: constructing syntactic dependencies is made more difficult by increasing structural or linear distance between the two elements in a dependency. In this talk I am going to explore the relationship between syntactic locality effects and domain-general models of working memory. I'm going to present evidence for locality effects in the processing of long-distance reflexives in Mandarin Chinese, a finding that suggests i) that locality effects are more widespread in sentence processing than previously expected and ii) locality effects arise due to memory search processes over linguistic structures. In the second half of the talk I will discuss in-progress work (with Yangsook Park) on the processing of Korean long-distance reflexives. A contrast between two Korean anaphors suggests that locality effects do not simply reflect a conspiracy of non-structural factors such as temporal decay. Instead, it seems that memory search processes over linguistic representations give rise to locality effects, and that these search processes may operate differently for superficially similar lexical items.

GSAS Indo-European Workshop

Alexander Forte (Harvard University)
[Title TBA]
Friday, February 22 | 4pm | Boylson 104