[lingtalks] Monday: Philip Hofmeister & Jon Sprouse Mini-Symposium

[Klinton Bicknell]

On Monday 4 May at 2pm, The UCSD Linguistics Department will host a  
mini-symposium in AP&M 4301. Philip Hofmeister (UC-San Diego, http://crl.ucsd.edu/~phofmeister/ 
  ) and Jon Sprouse (UC-Irvine, http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jsprouse/ )  
will give back-to-back 20 minute talks, followed by back-to-back 10  
minute responses and then general questions--a sort of debate format.  
It should make for an exciting and interesting time!

:: Abstracts ::

Looking for evidence in the islands debate: working memory capacity  
and acceptability judgments

Jon Sprouse (UC-Irvine)

The islands debate has been around for over 15 years, and shows no  
sign of imminent resolution. One reason for its endurance is that the  
very fact that gives rise to the debate - the necessarily close  
interaction of grammar and parser in determining acceptability  
judgments - also makes it extremely difficult to isolate unique  
predictions for either side. In this talk, I'd like to illustrate this  
complexity by examining the relationship between individual working  
memory capacity and island effects. Results of a study of 144 English  
speakers suggests that there is no effect of working memory capacity  
on the acceptability of island violations. This result is readily  
predicted by grammar-based theories, but only predicted by processing- 
based theories under a very specific set of assumptions about the role  
of working memory during sentence processing. At least for me, this  
suggests that the source of island effects may in fact be grammatical  
(or grammaticized) locality constraints.

A processing-based view of syntactic island phenomena

Philip Hofmeister (UC-San Diego)

Given a contrast in linguistic acceptability judgments, two viable  
explanations for such a contrast are possible, although not mutually  
exclusive: (1) the contrast results from underlying grammaticality  
differences (competence) or (2) the contrast is the by-product of  
processing constraints (performance). In this talk, I will discuss the  
kinds of evidence that can be used to distinguish such accounts,  
focusing particularly on the case of Subjacency violations. In  
particular, I will argue that the evidence (from self-paced reading  
time studies and acceptability surveys) favors a processing-based  
account of Subjacency and well-known exceptions to Subjacency.

-- 

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