More than words: Morphology and the universality of language
A video recording of the event and the slides can be found here.
What goes “up” when you “eat up”? How are grapes the same as cars, sand and oil? What can Grey Worm from Game of Thrones tell us about how we talk about each other? This panel brings together a number of leading morphologists – linguists who study words – to discuss how the diversity of morphological phenomena in the languages of the world can point us towards commonalities between languages, and ultimately towards a better understanding of language and cognition.
In addition to the regular invited talks, the workshop will featured a panel discussion aimed a non-specialist general audience. The panel discussed how the apparent diversity of morphological phenomena in the languages of the world can point us towards commonalities between languages.
This public event showcased the importance of morphology and linguistics as a whole for our understanding of language and cognition: what seem like “exotic” phenomena in the morphological systems of different languages can actually implicate strong commonalities or even universals, once analyzed properly.
Panelists
- Artemis Alexiadou, Professor, University of Stuttgart
- Daniel Harbour, Reader in the Cognitive Science of Language, Queen Mary University of London
- Beth Levin, William H. Bonsall Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University
- Andrew Nevins, Professor of Linguistics, University College London
- Gillian Ramchand, Professor, University of Tromsø, and Senior Researcher, Center for the Advanced Study of Theoretical Linguistics
- Malka Rappaport Hovav, Henya Sharef Professor of Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Moderator
Alec Marantz, Professor of Linguistics and Psychology, NYU