[lingtalks] TODAY: Robert Port (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

TODAY at 2pm, Robert Port (Indiana University; http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/ 
  ) will give a colloquium in the UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M  
4301.

:: Abstract ::

Rich linguistic memory shows language must be a social object, not  
psychological

It has been shown that languages are not composed from some apriori  
alphabet of symbols (Port & Leary, 2005 Language), so where do  
phonological regularities (and lexical items, etc.) come from? There  
is evidence that a community of speakers (as a complex system)  
imitates and categorizes each other's speech and tends to evolve  
categories of sound that resemble discrete phonemes.  This implies  
that phonological patterns (as well as lexical and grammatical  
patterns) are inherently social and do not consist of tokens stored  
and manipulated in the brains of speakers, as we have thought.   
Linguists have trusted their intuitions about phonemes when we should  
have considered the likelihood that literacy training would determine  
our intuitions about language. So phonology is a social institution  
that can only imitate an abstract alphabet, since it is distributed  
across the community and relies on a rich memory representation. All  
alphabets are a recent technology for low-bitrate representation of  
language.   But only our written language employs an alphabet.

-- 

For further information about the Linguistics department colloquia
series, including the schedule of future events, please visit http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia.html 
  .