Meeting 20-Feb-2019: Evelina Leivada (University of Tromsø)
Dear CAT members and friends,
Join us this Wednesday, February 20th, at 6:30pm at the CAT lab (E004) for Evelina’s Leivada (University of Tromsø) presentation on “Linguistic primitives: Terminological fluidity and commensurability considerations” (Web conferencing link, join here). The abstract can be found below.
Abstract:
The aim of this talk is twofold. First, I will identify and analyze 10 cases of terminological fluidity, polysemy and/or misuse in linguistic research. Terms like ‘feature’, ‘linguistic genotype’, ‘parameter’, ‘language universal’, and ‘Universal Grammar’ are pervasive in linguistic research. Through discussing issues related to their (mis)use, I will show how the implicit or explicit assumptions behind their postulation carry important implications in relation to the (i) coherence of the field and (ii) position linguistics currently has within the broader scheme of things in cognitive science. Through (ii), I will connect the two aims of this talk and make the transition from linguistics-internal terminological issues to linguistics-external, interdisciplinary considerations that pertain to commensurability and granularity. More specifically, I will focus on the syntactic domain within a Minimalist framework and discuss whether the primitives on which its theories are built are primitives that are sui generis sustainable also from a biological point of view.
Best regards,
Natalia
Upcoming CAT meetings- Spring Semester 2019
Feb 27- Constantina Fotiou, TBA
Mar 6- TBA
Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, TBA
Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
Mar 27- TBA
Apr 3- Eleni Papadopoulou, TBA
Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, TBA