Competence & Performance

語言能力與語言表現

Fall 2021        Wednesday 14:10-17:00         文學院 (Humanities) 413

編號 (Course code number): 1307561

 

Other Web resources

 

UPDATED 2021/12/02

Me:

James Myers (麥傑)

Office: 文學院247

Tel: x31506

WWW: http://personal.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/

Office hours: Wednesday 10:00-noon, or by appointment (made at least 24 hours ahead)

 

Goals:

This class addresses the traditional distinction between competence (grammar) and performance (processing) from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. On the empirical side, we ask questions such as: How can experiments and corpus analyses be used to test hypotheses about grammar (semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology)? What does it mean if the results of experiments and corpus analyses don’t match? On the theoretical side, we ask questions like: How do competence and performance interact? Does the distinction even make any sense? What counts as “grammar” anyway? Hopefully the tools and ideas that we will discuss will have practical applications for the students’ own projects beyond this class as well.

 

Grading:

10% Class participation

40% Leading discussion

10% Presentations (12/29)

40% Term paper (due 1/12)

 

What the class is like:

        This class is a discussion class. All we will do is read papers (real ones, not from a textbook) and discuss them together. So class participation means you discuss: you read, think, talk, and respond to others’ ideas.

        Every week somebody will lead the discussion on the week’s readings, using a handout with questions to inspire us to discuss together. The questions should be organized in a logical way to make sure we address the most important issues in the paper, situating them in a larger context, but your questions should also allow us to clarify smaller points in the paper that may be confusing. You are encouraged to ask questions that even you don’t know how to answer, but you are the one responsible to bring the focus back to the big issues if we get lost. You do not have to talk more than everybody else, and in fact, the more you inspire other people to say interesting things, the better. Send your questions to me (and only me) by 11 am on class day, so I can bring them to class and project them for all to see, to make sure that nobody can “practice” them ahead of time - we want our discussion to be spontaneous!

       By the middle of the semester (officially 12/1, but the earlier the better), you should choose a topic of your own to write about. You will test a grammatical hypothesis in syntax, semantics, morphology, or phonology using an experiment and/or a corpus analysis. After you choose your topic, the discussions will then turn to focus on papers that you choose to help you with your project.

        On 12/29, you’ll give a conference-style presentation about your research: depending on the number of students, it may be about 15 minutes for the presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion. The last class is an open discussion (online). The paper is due two weeks after the presentations (one week after the last class, 1/12) as a PDF emailed to me by 5 pm. The paper should be about 10-20 pages, in “English”, with formatting like the real papers we read. I’ll grade them in the usual way (style, logic, theory). (And I can’t believe I have to say this, but hand in your term paper on time and don’t plagiarize, or face potentially serious consequences.)

 

 Schedule

* marks due dates for things relating to your paper

Week	Topic/Activity	Readings	Leaders
9/15	Introduction
9/22	Traditional evidence	Myers (2012)	Myers
9/29	Corpus evidence	Futrell et al. (2016)	Genny
10/6	Offline experimental evidence	Sprouse (2018)	Sylvia
10/13	Online experimental evidence	Lewis & Phillips (2015)	Anita
10/20	Typological evidence	de Vos & Pfau (2015)	Myers
10/27	Acquisition evidence	Gómez et al. (2014) Culbertson & Adger (2014)	Genny
11/3	Processing influences on grammar	Bickel et al. (2015)	Sylvia
11/10	The scope of grammar	Koelsch (2011)	Anita
11/17	Extending grammar to orthography	Evertz (2016)	Shih-Yuan
11/24	Chinese character grammar	Myers (forthcoming)	Myers
12/1	*Discuss paper topics
12/8	Experimental syntax	Ke et al. (2019)	Genny
12/15	Artificial grammar learning and syntactic universals	Culbertson et al. (2012)	Sylvia
12/22	Typological evidence and syntactic/semantic interactions	Lovestrand & Ross (2021)	Anita
12/29	*Presentations
1/5	Online discussion [last class]
1/12	*TERM PAPER DUE

 

Readings

Bickel, B., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., Choudhary, K. K., Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. (2015). The neurophysiology of language processing shapes the evolution of grammar: Evidence from case marking. PloS One, 10(8), e0132819.

Culbertson, J., & Adger, D. (2014). Language learners privilege structured meaning over surface frequency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(16), 5842-5847.

Culbertson, J., Smolensky, P., & Legendre, G. (2012). Learning biases predict a word order universal. Cognition, 122(3), 306-329.

de Vos, C., & Pfau, R. (2015). Sign language typology: The contribution of rural sign languages. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1(1), 265-288.

Evertz, M. (2016). Minimal graphematic words in English and German: Lexical evidence for a theory of graphematic feet. Written Language & Literacy, 19(2), 189-211.

Futrell, R., Stearns, L., Everett, D. L., Piantadosi, S. T., & Gibson, E. (2016). A corpus investigation of syntactic embedding in Pirahã. PLoS One, 11(3), e0145289.

Gómez, D. M., Berent, I., Benavides-Varela, S., Bion, R. A., Cattarossi, L., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2014). Language universals at birth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(16), 5837-5841.

Ke, A. H., Zhao, Y., Gao, L., Liu, S., & Pires, A. (2019). On the implicit anaphoric argument of relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48(4), 819-842.

Koelsch, S. (2011). Toward a neural basis of music perception–a review and updated model. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 110.

Lewis, S., & Phillips, C. (2015). Aligning grammatical theories and language processing models. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44(1), 27-46.

Lovestrand, J., & Ross, D. (2021). Serial verb constructions and motion semantics. In A. Guillaume & H. Koch (Eds.) Associated motion (pp. 87-128). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. [uncorrected proofs so lots of randomly colored text]

Myers, J. (2012). Methods in search of grammar, grammar in search of methods. In J. Myers (Ed.) In search of grammar: Empirical methods in linguistics (pp. 1-27). Language and Linguistics Monograph Series 48. Taipei, Taiwan: Language and Linguistics.

Myers, J. (forthcoming). Areal script form patterns with Chinese characteristics. To appear in Written Language & Literacy.

Sprouse, J. (2018). Acceptability judgments and grammaticality, prospects and challenges. In N. Hornstein, H. Lasnik, P. Patel-Grosz, & C. Yang (Eds.). Syntactic Structures after 60 Years: The impact of the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics (pp. 195-224). De Gruyter Mouton.