Syllabus for LING 890 "The Organization of Language

Overview

Are linguists and psycholinguists studying the same mental object?

Since the late 1960s it has been widely assumed in linguistics and psychology that the human language system consists of a number of independent systems, each of which is responsible for a different aspect of language abilities: linguists study linguistic competence, a body of knowledge which accounts for the ability to make grammaticality judgments; psychologists study linguistic performance systems, which are the systems of the mind/brain which are directly responsible for language perception and production.

The alternative view that human language abilities are less fragmented, and consist of a system of knowledge which is directly used in comprehension and production, seems to have been common in the early years of generative grammar and cognitive psychology, but has only surfaced sporadically since then. In this course we will reexamine this issue in the light of current knowledge in linguistics, language comprehension and production and neurolinguistics.

The course presupposes some background in syntax - roughly the equivalent of the first year graduate curriculum in syntax - and little background in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.

Requirements

Simple!

  1. Come to class and be an active participant
  2. Take responsibility for leading the discussion of a couple of articles/chapters
  3. Write two short papers ('squibs') on a topic related to the couse.

Requirements (1) and (2) apply to listeners as well as to registered students. Ideally, the two squibs should be on different topics, one related to the traditionally linguistic issues discussed in the first half of the course, the other related to the traditionally psycholinguistic issues discussed in the second half of the course. There are many different interesting areas that could be explored, and if you're unsure of what to do, you should come talk to me for suggestions. In any case, you should let me know in advance what you are planning to write about. The first squib is due on the day before Spring Break, Friday April 2nd, the second is due on the last day of classes, Wednesday May 20th.

Schedule

Time and Place

Outline

#1: February 10th
Introduction: Linguistics & Psycholinguistics
Reading: Bever 1988, Phillips 1996 ch.1, 5
#2: February 17th
Constituency and structure building
Reading: Chomsky 1994, Phillips 1998 (or 1996, Ch.2)
#3: February 24th
Flexible constituency
Reading: Steedman 1996, Steedman 1997, Pesetsky 1995, Brody 1994
#4: March 3rd
More on constituent structure
Reading: Johnson 1994, more tba.
#5: March 10th
Constituency in other languages
Reading: Koizumi 1995, others tba.
#6: March 17th
Incrementality and movement
Reading: Kempson & Gabbay 1997, Fox 1997
#7: March 24th
Incrementality: prosodic structure
Reading: Gee & Grosjean 1983, Steedman 1996, Phillips 1996, Ch. 4.5
#8: March 31st
Economy & Complexity in parsing
Reading: Gorrell 1995, de Vincenzi 1992, Epstein 1992

April 4th-12th: Spring Break

#9: April 14th
Sentence comprehension and transformations
Reading: Bever & McElree 1988, MacDonald 1989, Bever & Sanz 1997
#10: April 21st
Grammaticality judgments from parser
Reading: Berwick & Weinberg 1984, Pritchett 1991, Hawkins 1994, Schneider in prep. (if ready)
#11: April 28th
Incremental sentence production
Reading: Ferreira 1997, Bock & Levelt 1995, Kempen & Hoenkamp 1987
#12: May 5th
ERPs & predictibility
Reading: Kutas & van Petten 1995, Friederici 1995
#13: May 12th Aphasia: lack of central deficits; conduction aphasia
#14: May 19th
Comprehension/production parallels in Broca's aphasia
Reading: Grodzinsky 1990, Zurif 1995, Kolk 1995

Readings

As with the schedule for the course, the list below is intended as a guide only, and is likely to change as the semester progresses.

  1. Berwick, Robert & Amy Weinberg. 1984. Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  2. Bever, Thomas. 1988. The psychological reality of grammar: a student's-eye view of cognitive science. In W. Hirst (ed.), The making of cognitive science: essays in honor of George A. Miller. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 112­142.
  3. Bever, Thomas & Brian McElree. 1988. Empty categories access their antecedents during comprehension. Linguistic Inquiry 19, 35­43.
  4. Bever, Thomas & Montserrat Sanz. 1997. Empty Categories access their Antecedents during Comprehension: Unaccusatives in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry 28, 69-91.
  5. Bock, Kay & Willem Levelt. 1994. Language Production: Grammatical Encoding. In M. Gernsbacher (ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press.
  6. Brody, Michael. 1994. Phrase Structure and Dependency. ms., University College, London and Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
  7. Chomsky, N. 1994. Bare Phrase Structure. In G. Webelhuth (ed), Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.385-439.
  8. de Vincenzi, Marica. 1992. Syntactic parsing strategies in Italian. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  9. Epstein, Sam. 1992. Derivational Constraints on A'-chain Formation. Linguistic Inquiry 23, 235-259.
  10. Ferreira, V. 1997. Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 724-755.
  11. Fodor, Jerry, Thomas Bever & Merrill Garrett. 1974. The Psychology of Language. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  12. Fox, Danny. 1997. Reconstruction, Binding Theory and the Interpretation of Chains. ms., MIT.
  13. Friederici, A. 1995. The time course of syntactic activation during language processing: a model based on neuropsychological and neurophysiological data. Brain and Language 50, 259-281.
  14. Gee, James & Francois Grosjean. 1983. Performance Structures: A Psycholinguistic and Linguistic Appraisal. Cognitive Psychology 15, 411-458.
  15. Gorrell, Paul. 1995. Syntax and Parsing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  16. Grodzinsky, Yosef. 1990. Theoretical Perspectives on Language Deficits. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  17. Hawkins, John. 1994. A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  18. Johnson, Kyle. 1994. ms., UMass/Amherst.
  19. Kempen, Gerard & Eduard Hoenkamp. 1987. An Incremental Procedural Grammar for Sentence Formulation. Cognitive Science 11, 201-258.
  20. Kempson, Ruth & Dov Gabbay. 1997. ms., SOAS/Imperial College, London.
  21. Koizumi, Masatoshi. 1995. Phrase Structure in Minimalist Syntax. PhD thesis, MIT.
  22. Kolk, Hermann. 1995. A Time-Based Approach to Agrammatic Production. Brain and Language 50, 282-303.
  23. Kutas, Marta & Cyma van Petten. 1994. Psycholinguistics Electrified! In: M. Gernsbacher (ed) Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press.
  24. MacDonald, Maryellen. 1989. Priming effects from gaps to antecedents. Language and Cognitive Processes 4, 1­72.
  25. Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  26. Phillips, Colin. 1996. Order and Structure. PhD thesis, MIT.
  27. Phillips, Colin. 1998. Linear Order and Constituency. ms. U. of Delaware.
  28. Pritchett, Bradley. 1991. Subjacency in a principle-based parser. In R. Berwick, S. Abney & C. Tenny (eds.), Principle-based parsing: computation and psycholinguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 301­345.
  29. Schneider, David. in prep. Dissertation chapter on detecting ungrammaticality in an incremental parser. ms., U. of Delaware.
  30. Steedman, Mark. 1996. The Syntactic Interface. ms., UPenn.
  31. Steedman, Mark. 1997. Surface Structure and Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  32. Zurif, Edgar. 1995. Brain Regions of Relevance to Syntactic Processing. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds.) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 1 (2nd edn). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.381-397.