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Design features of language: Language universals emerging from general purpose learning constraints| old_uid | 10372 |
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| title | Design features of language: Language universals emerging from general purpose learning constraints |
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| start_date | 2011/11/15 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 163 |
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| summary | In Greenberg's (1960) work on language universals, he proposed a set of "design features" as definitional properties that all languages share. Unlike the grammatical and morphological properties of languages that Greenberg investigated, these definitional properties seem to be true language universals. In my talk, I will present evidence that these definitional properties are products of selective pressures of communicative efficiency and learnability. In particular, I will present research on the arbitrariness of the sign, such that the relationship between the sound and the meaning of a word is largely uncorrelated, combining corpus analyses, artificial language learning studies and computational modelling approaches |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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