Symposium on Syntactic Complexity

[Naonori Nagaya]

(apologies for cross-postings)


Dear Colleagues,


You are cordially invited to The 12th Biennial Rice University
Symposium on Language, to be held at Rice University, Texas, on
March 27th-29th,2008. The program and the abstracts of the plenary
papers are now available at:

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~eivs/sympo/

Registration is free; please preregister at this website.




 The 12th Biennial Rice University Symposium on Language
             The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity:
                 An Interdisciplinary Symposium
                                  Program

****THURSDAY, MARCH 27****
Morning session (9am–12noon): Diachrony-I

Opening remarks: T. Givón

Bernd Heine (Köln)
"A grammaticalization perspective on the rise of syntactic complexity"

Marianne Mithun (UC Santa Barbara)
"Re(e)volving complexity: adding intonation"

Matt Shibatani (Rice)
"Elements of complex structures , where recursion isn't"

Afternoon session (2pm–5–pm): Child Language

Holger Diessel (Jena)
"The emergence of relative clauses in early child language"

Cecilia Rojas (UNAM, Mexico)
"Starting small' processes in the acquisition of early relative clauses in Spanish"

T. Givón (Oregon
 "The acquisition of complex VPs: How children learn to negotiate fact and desire"


****FRIDAY, MARCH 28*****
Morning session (9am–12noon):   Diachrony-II

Guy Deutscher (Leiden)
"Nominalization and the origin of subordination"

Martin Hilpert (UC Berkeley) and Christian Koops (Rice)
"The rise of pragmatic complexity: Diachronic and cross-linguistic aspects of pseudo-clefts"

T. Givón (Oregon)
"Toward a diachronic typology of relative clauses"


Afternoon session (2pm–6pm): Cognition-Neurology

Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie Mellon)
"The emergence of linguistic complexity through catalysis and usage"

Eric Pederson & Mitzi Barker (Oregon)
"Syntactic complexity and coordination in a verbal production task"

Diego Fernandez-Duque (Villa Nova)
"Cognitive underpinning of syntactic complexity: A possible role for 'chunking'?"


****SATURDAY, MARCH 29****

Morning session (9am-12noon): Diachrony-III

Östen Dahl (Stockholm)
"Two pathways of grammatical evolution"

Andrew Pawley (Canberra)
"On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam"

Claire Bowern (Rice)
"Defining complexity: Arguments from historical reconstruction"

Afternoon session (2pm–5pm): Biology and Evolution

Nathan Tublitz (Oregon)
"Neural plasticity: A window into the complexity of the brain"

Don Tucker (Oregon)
"Neural mechanisms of the language process"

Derek Bickerton (Hawaii)
"How central is recursivity?"


We look forward to seeing you at the symposium.


Matt Shibatani
Department of Linguistics
Rice University
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