Language Universality and Innateness

Language Universality and Innateness
語言共性與先天性
Fall 2012 Wednesday 9:10-12:00 文學院413

課碼: 1307041

UPDATED 2013/1/8

James Myers (麥傑)
Office: 文學院247
Tel: 31506
Email: Lngmyers at the usual place
Web: http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/
Office hours: Tuesday 10 am to 12 noon, or by appointment

Goals

Nothing stirs up debate in linguistics more than the issues of language universality and innateness, and nothing resolves debates better than empirical evidence and explanatory models. In this class you will immerse yourself in the most recent empirical and modeling research on these issues, and hopefully challenge yourself to look beyond your own preconceptions. You will critically evaluate evidence from a variety of sources (including typology, language acquisition, and experimental psycholinguistics), and learn how to collect and rigorously analyze such data for yourselves (no prior background is needed in any of these areas). By the end of the class, you will be ready to make your own original empirical contributions that shed new light on the nature of language.

Grading

10% Class participation
40% Leading discussion
10% Quantitative exercises
40% Term paper

What the class is like

The weekly readings will usually include papers by authors with opposing viewpoints, so there are often a lot of pages to read each week. The papers are also often quite technical, coming from areas that you are unfamiliar with. The trick to reading long, hard papers is to focus on the big picture, instead of getting stuck on little details. When reading, always ask yourself three basic questions: What is the paper's main claim? How convincingly does the paper argue for the main claim? What is the most interesting aspect of the paper for you?

But don't worry - this is not a paper-memorizing class; it's a discussion class. Class participation means that you discuss: you read, think, talk, and respond to others' ideas. Don't be afraid to ask for clarification - that's also part of the discussion.

Every week somebody will lead the discussion on the week's readings, using a handout as a guide. The discussion leader should NOT summarize the paper or ask simple comprehension questions, but instead ask open-ended questions to help people focus on the crucial points in the readings, and to inspire people to get involved and express what they think. A discussion is a living thing: you should keep it on track, but feel free to follow its natural flow.

In order to get training in some of the technical methods we will read about, there will be one set of take-home exercises due on 11/28. Exercises in the set will be distributed at different times, so you'll have more than one week to finish the whole thing.

About a month before the end of the semester (12/5), you will propose an original research topic of your own, addressing universality and/or innateness using the empirical and/or modeling methods illustrated in class. On the last day of class (1/9), you'll give an informal, ungraded presentation about your research, just to get feedback. The paper is due a week later (1/16), before 5 pm, as a PDF file emailed to me, with your ID number included in the filename. The paper should be about 20 pages, in English, with formatting like the real published papers we read. I'll grade it in the usual way (style, logic, theory).

Schedule (Some of these readings may change!)

*Marks when something is due

Week	Topic/Activity	Readings	Leader
9/19	Introduction to universality
9/26	Typological universals	VanValin (2006) Bobaljik (2008)	麥傑
10/3	The challenges of typology	Haspelmath (2010a,b) Newmeyer (2010)	柳禹睿
10/10	NO CLASS (Double Tenth)
10/17	Explaining (away) universals	Evans & Levinson (2009) Reuland & Everaert (2010) Safir (2010) Levinson & Evans (2010)	楊振宗
10/24	Rara	Everett (2005, 2009) Nevins et al. (2009a,b)	莊偉強
10/31	Quantitative typology	Cysouw (2005) Dunn et al. (2011) Croft et al. (2011)	麥傑
11/7	Poverty of the stimulus: Input	MacWhinney (2004) Pinker (2004) Stefanowitsch (2006)	柳禹睿
11/14	Poverty of the stimulus: Learners	Crain & Khlentzos (2010) Boyd & Goldberg (2011)	江冠南
11/21	Artificial grammar experiments	Carpenter (2010) Culbertson et al. (2012)	莊偉強
*11/28	Critical/sensitive periods Quantitative exercises due	Rothman (2008) DeKeyser et al. (2010)	楊振宗
*12/5	Discuss paper topics
12/12	Universality and processing	Myers (2010) Hawkins (2011)	江冠南
12/19	Learnability: Mathematical models	Johnson (2004) Stabler (2009)	羅佳雯
12/26	Learnability: Computational models	Perfors et al. (2011) Berwick et al. (2011)	楊振宗
1/2	Genetics	Stromswold (2008) Fisher & Scharff (2009) Chen et al. (2012)	麥傑
*1/9	Presentations [last class]
*1/16	TERM PAPER DUE (by 5 pm, via email)

Readings

Berwick, R. C., Pietroski, P., Yankama, B., & Chomsky, N. (2011). Poverty of the stimulus revisited. Cognitive Science, 35 (7), 1207-1242.

Bobaljik, J. D. (2008). Missing persons: A case study in morphological universals. The Linguistic Review, 25, 203-230.

Boyd, J. K., & Goldberg, A. E. (2011). Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production. Language, 87 (1), 55-83.

Carpenter, A. C. (2010). A naturalness bias in learning stress. Phonology, 27, 345-392.

Chen, C.-H., et al. (2012). Hierarchical genetic organization of human cortical surface area. Science, 335, 1634-1636.

Crain, S., & Khlentzos, D. (2010). The logic instinct. Mind & Language, 25 (1), 30-65.

Croft, W., Bhattacharya, T., Kleinschmidt, D., Smith, D. E., & Jaeger, T. F. (2011). Greenbergian universals, diachrony, and statistical analyses. Linguistic Typology, 15, 433-453.

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

Cysouw, M. (2005). Quantitative methods in typology. In R. Kohler, G. Altmann, & R. G. Piotrowski (Eds.) Quantitative Linguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch [Quantitative linguistics: An international handbook] (pp. 554-578). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

DeKeyser, R., Alfi-Shabtay, I., & Ravid, D. (2010). Cross-linguistic evidence for the nature of age effects in second language acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 413-438.

Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Levinson, S. C., & Gray, R. D. (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature, 473, 79-82.

Evans, N., & Levinson, S. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 429-492.

Everett, D. L. (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language. Current Anthropology, 46 (4), 621-646.

Everett, D. L. (2009). Pirahã culture and grammar: A response to some criticisms. Language, 85 (2), 405-442.

Fisher, S. E., & Scharff, C. (2009). FOXP2 as a molecular window into speech and language. Trends in Genetics, 25 (4), 166-177.

Haspelmath, M. (2010a). Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86 (3), 663-687.

Haspelmath, M. (2010b). The interplay between comparative concepts and descriptive categories (Reply to Newmeyer). Language, 86 (3), 696-699.

Hawkins, J. A. (2011). Processing efficiency and complexity in typological patterns. In J. J. Song (Ed.) The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology (pp. 206-226). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, K. (2004). Gold's theorem and cognitive science. Philosophy of Science, 71 (4), 571-592.

Levinson, S. C., & Evans, N. (2010). Time for a sea-change in linguistics: Response to comments on 'The Myth of Language Universals'. Lingua, 120, 2733-2758.

MacWhinney, B. (2004). A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 31, 883-914.

Myers, J. (2010). Chinese as a natural experiment. The Mental Lexicon, 5 (3), 423-437.

Nevins, A., Pesetsky, D., & Rodrigues, C. (2009a). Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language, 85 (2), 355-404.

Nevins, A., Pesetsky, D., & Rodrigues, C. (2009b). Evidence and argumentation: A reply to Everett (2009). Language, 85 (3), 671-681.

Newmeyer, F. J. (2010). On comparative concepts and descriptive categories: A reply to Haspelmath. Language, 86 (3), 688-695.

Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Regier, T. (2011). The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition, 118, 306-338.

Pinker, S. (2004). Clarifying the logical problem of language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 31, 949-953.

Reuland, E., & Everaert, M. (2010). Reaction to: 'The Myth of Language Universals' and cognitive science - Evans and Levinson's cabinet of curiosities: Should we pay the fee? Lingua, 120, 2713-2716.

Rothman, J. (2008). Why all counter-evidence to the critical period hypothesis in second language acquisition is not equal or problematic. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2 (6), 1063-1088.

Safir, K. (2010). How not to find linguistic universals. Lingua, 120, 2723-2726.

Stabler, E. P. (2009). Computational models of language universals: Expressiveness, learnability and consequences. In M. H. Christiansen, C. Collins, & S. Edelman (Eds.) Language universals (pp. 200-223). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Stefanowitsch, A. (2006). Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2 (1), 61-77.

Stromswold, K. (2008). The genetics of speech and language impairments. The New England Journal of Medicine, 359, 2381-2383.

Van Valin, R. D. (2006). Some universals of verb semantics. In R. Maira & J. Gil (Eds.) Linguistic universals (pp. 155-178). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Universality & innateness links (submit your suggestions!)

Child language

* Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)

* Journal of Child Language

* Language Acquisition

* Taiwan Child Language Corpus (TAICORP): Data files (zip)

Language and biology

* Biolinguistics

* The Human Connectome Project

* The Human Genome Project

Typological databases

* The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP): 100-word lists from almost 6000 languages